Lead Nurturing Step 1: Know the Differences Between CRM and Marketing Automation

A major part of achieving sales and marketing alignment is knowing the differences between CRM and marketing automation and how sales and marketing utilize each of these solutions to drive business-wide success.

From the start, marketing automation helps to foster leads and get them ready for your sales team.

Once the lead has progressed through to the bottom of the funnel and become a sales-qualified lead (SQL) and hopefully, ultimately a customer, that’s when companies track their interactions through CRM technology like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

While CRM technology has evolved tremendously over the years and are nearly unlimited with possibilities, at its core, CRM technology stores information like how long a contact has been a lead, prospect, or customer, keeps a record of opportunities, and order history for purchases each customer has made in the past, the dates and notes of a phone call, email, and social conversations you’ve had with contacts in the past, a record of inbound emails they’ve sent to your sales and customer service team, and much more.

When it comes to marketing automation and CRM, the choices seem endless.

There are a plethora of marketing automation options today. Leaders include Hubspot, Act-On, Pardot, ClickDimensions, and many others. On the CRM side, familiar names like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 lead the way.

In some cases, you will find that CRM software has limited marketing automation features and vice-versa for marketing automation technology. To realize the full benefits of each of these systems, most companies use both a marketing automation and CRM system. However, the most successful businesses today use these technologies together and provide an integration or connector between the two to really optimize them in full capacity.

Since marketers nurture leads for the sales team, for the purpose of this eBook, we will focus on the value of marketing automation in this chapter. Today, we see many companies who may have marketing automation systems, but simply use it for emails and failing to leverage almost 80, to 90% of its capabilities.

But marketing automation is so much more than just sending emails.

At its core, marketing automation is technology that helps streamline, automate, and measure marketing activities across channels.

Said another way, marketing automation is the engine that can ensure the right message gets to the right person at the right time. (What’s not to love about that?)

In one of our newest eBooks, we give you the 12 steps to getting started with lead nurturing and cover everything from the basics to the differences between CRM and marketing automation to succeeding with email marketing campaigns to getting sales and marketing on the same page, and more.

Get the 12 steps when you download your complimentary eBook copy.