Technology has impacted modern sales strategy to the point that most companies are now scrambling to update marketing systems with contemporary tools that help make their campaigns more attractive to potential customers. Today’s sophisticated CRM platforms offer marketing automation as an enhancement that increases the effectiveness of customer relations overall.
Marketing automation, therefore, isn’t an alternative to customer relationship management, but rather an extension of its central theme, a plug-in enhancement that maximizes the power of the central platform your business uses. While both can function independent of each other, their impact is greatest when employed together to promote stronger customer relationships.
Adding marketing automation capabilities to your sales and marketing initiatives is like putting CRM on steroids. The added functionality to manage manual interactions remotely is a huge benefit, since these are the most time-consuming activities that previously required lots of manual input, with no intrinsic value.
The CRM platform is the database that brings prospects to your door; marketing automation executes the functionality that drives them through the sales funnel. Sales teams love to see companies invest in marketing automation, because it allows them to spend more time doing what they do best – selling to potential customers.
A proper system operates like this: CRM reports on useful data that companies use to sell more intelligently to qualified leads. Marketing automation then analyzes consumer behaviors to employ modules that convert those same prospects more consistently. Users gain complete control over creating, initiating, and tweaking high-quality campaigns within the same platform, to the most promising visitors that interact with their brand.
Nothing irritates sales managers more than seeing their team waste precious time chasing dead leads. Lead scoring based on criteria you design takes much of the guesswork out of building bridges between window shoppers and repeat customers. This also makes it easier to quantify a true return on investment (ROI) and monitor how well each campaign is performing.
Thus, the more complex your sales cycle, the more benefits you gain by automating at least some aspects of ongoing campaigns. The feedback from evaluating products and services alone can correct mistakes before they become too costly to manage. Segmented consumer groups receive more personalized messages that carry more weight at critical stages of the sales cycle.
With marketing automation in control of your marketing mix, you’ll discover how to direct responders to specific landing pages that get the most traffic, at the most convenient times, when their most receptive to the information you share.
In the best of situations, marketing automation increases efficiency and amplifies the power of your lead generation module, optimizing selling opportunities with customers as a result. How? By tracking behavioral patterns and buying habits within the data stream to market the right messages to the right customers at the right time.
Even so, sales managers now realize no such system is entirely self-sufficient or foolproof. You still have to monitor results, train new users, track performance, and communicate with employees and vendors to make sure the time and money you invest in mating marketing automation and CRM platforms produce real outcomes that bring healthy revenues to your business, consistently.
This post was authored by Alex Fishleder and originally appeared here on Maximizer CRM.
