Marketing Productivity with CRM

Marketing productivity with CRM can be improved as it enables the sales and the marketing teams to work together. While many businesses tend to keep these two departments separate, those who have promoted collaboration between sales and marketing have discovered its benefits. Isolating one department from another is never a good move. Especially when marketing generates leads and passes them to the sales teams. 

 

Building marketing relationships with CRM 

CRM technology has been around since the 1980s but only in the past few years, it has been seen as a tool for sales and marketing. As an effective sales manager toolkit, CRM allows both marketers and sales managers to integrate their efforts.

CRM allows:

• Tracking and managing sales activity 
• The organisation of customer and prospects data
• Scheduling follow-ups 
• Tracking the sales pipeline 

The departments used CRM to track the result of sales in the old days. A very few marketers took interest in CRM then. And even if they did, their activity was limited to exporting customer records, email service or using a standalone marketing system to run campaigns. The information would disappear and this increased the chance of data duplication or error. Another problem was doing the administrative work that took up most of the time. 

At best, CRM was inefficient for markets and minimally effective. Communication between departments was messy and there was a general mistrust within the organisation as no one took responsibility for anything. 

But at the present, CRM tracks every activity of the team members. Optimiser CRM comes with an intuitive interface and AI-enabled automation that updates information swiftly and removes chances of human error.

 

Read More: 7 Important KPIs for Successful Marketing Campaigns

 

Benefits of CRM in Marketing productivity 

 

Improved visibility 

With a CRM system maintaining your records for you, your sales teams can access marketing data and campaign information. They can find data on existing customers to see how they can offer a personalised selling experience when they interact with the customers. They will know the leads' likes and dislikes and during the interaction, the data will be updated in the software. 

When the leads are being dealt with, the sales agents can see what offers they can provide to the said leads. 

 

Integration between teams 

When sales and marketing are working together, their strategy tends to be that much more effective. While marketing deals with warming up the leads and nurturing them to be sales-ready, the sales teams work with the collected information about the prospects to understand their pain points and advertise the product or service as a solution. Rather than arguing with each other about how leads are not effective, the two departments can collaborate together to garner quality leads and ensure ample follow-ups.

 

 

Customer Segmentation 

Before CRM, marketing teams used to export names and email addresses from their sources and they were all considered to be leads. Segmentation, due to this very reason, was not very targeted. People only considered the market or industry for segmentation. 

Now, it has evolved with much personalisation. Marketers know leads birthdays, trends they follow, the product of interest, the pain points etc. Their most specific needs are within the reach of the marketers. With customers segmented into smaller groups, the campaigns are more personalised and the leads relate to them. It persuades them to take action and learn more about the product/ service offered. 

This will generate trust and relationships with the leads as the messages are specific and personal. 

 

Marketing impact analysis 

Marketers can follow the progress of the campaigns from one platform. Optimiser CRM that comes with a marketing automation suite allows the users to run unlimited reports. These comprehensive charts and graphs are easy to understand and can be used for discussion for future campaigns and their performance. 

 

Measuring marketing effectiveness 

The measurement of marketing effectiveness is nothing new. Marketers track the ROI to see how effective the marketing campaigns have been. Using CRM software, both sales and marketing can look up the performances of the sales and marketing teams to see the results of their efforts. 

 

Summary

CRM helps in building a better relationship with sales, marketing and clients. The two departments can nurture the leads so effectively that it reduces the sales cycle. This relationship can help these departments improve the customer retention rate.