CRM with Marketing Automation: Benefits, Tools, and Challenges

The default CRM setup only records data about and for one-on-one customer interactions.

Imagine a situation where your sales and customer service teams have a complete, 360-degree view of each customer from the CRM. They can see every prior engagement with the customer, from the first website visit to the last email open.

CRM with marketing automation makes such a world possible. You can now create end-to-end connected experiences, ensuring every communication is timely, personalized, and relevant.

We at Coffee+Dunn help businesses build connected experiences for every step of the customer journey. See how our customer engagement services can transform your business.

What’s the Difference – CRM vs. Marketing Automation?

You need a platform to centralize and manage all your one-on-one interactions with leads and customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms solve for this.

They help you stay connected with customers while providing tools to streamline associated processes. For instance, the typical CRM will come with the following features:

• • Contact management features to collect and organize customer information.
  • Sales pipeline management features to track deals through their entire journey.
  • Automation features to streamline data entries, follow-ups, report generation, etc.
  • Customer service features to manage support tickets.

While valuable, these features don’t capture the behavioural and transactional data you need to comprehensively understand your customers. The limitation is a key point of departure between CRMs and marketing automation software.

Marketing automation focuses on the data required or availed earlier in the customer journey, often even before a customer interacts one-on-one with your team.

You’ll typically have the following features in marketing automation software:

• • Lead nurturing features to warm up leads.
  • Ability to build landing pages with templates.
  • Lead scoring features so you know sales-ready leads.
  • Email marketing features to create, schedule, and send email campaigns.
  • Social media features to create, schedule, and run social media campaigns.

The most valuable capability of marketing automation software is the data it can collect, unify, and activate. The most robust of these apps have features that allow them to also function as a Customer Data Platform (CDP).

A CDP collects customer data from several sources, resolves identities, and unifies the data to create a 360-degree view of each customer. You’ll then have a “single source of truth” to integrate with other systems, including CRMs.

Benefits of CRM and Marketing Automation Integration

Integrating your CRM with marketing automation systems creates synergy between your marketing and sales/customer service teams. The enhanced coordination and data flow have several benefits, including:

• • Alignment of goals: When marketing and sales teams draw from a “single source of truth,” they can act in concert to achieve customer acquisition goals.
  • Enhanced productivity: Instead of sales teams looking for contextual data manually, they can get it seamlessly on their CRM view. It eliminates repetitive data sourcing tasks and frees them to focus on closing deals.
  • Better lead qualification: Behavioral data gives you insights into which leads are sales-ready. With improved lead scoring capabilities, you can allocate more sales resources to your hottest leads. Even better, Microsoft D365 Sales now has an AI qualification agent that can research prospects, engage them, and answer simple inquiries. Once the lead is ready, it hands it off to a salesperson.
  • Personalized lead nurturing: Because you have a comprehensive view of each lead, you can tailor lead nurturing to every individual in your pipeline. Also, you can send relevant, timely information based on their behaviour/actions.
  • More responsive, personalized customer service: Aside from the data from one-on-one interactions, your customer service team also gets transactional and behavioral data for each customer. The additional context results in far superior customer service experiences.

Most CRMs and marketing automation tools in the market today have integration capabilities. Therefore, you can always depend on them to work together seamlessly.

How CRM and Marketing Automation Work Together

The best CRM providers also offer marketing automation systems. Microsoft, for instance, has a suite of Dynamics 365 apps with CRM and marketing automation capabilities.

Microsoft offers these systems on one unified platform, the Microsoft Dataverse. You can, therefore, integrate them seamlessly. Further, the company offers the applications modularly, so you can only buy what you need.

Integrated, Coffee+Dunn would, for example, design the Dynamics 365 ecosystem to work together as follows:

• • Lead generation and nurturing: Use D365 Customer Insights to capture customer primary data, add them to a nurturing sequence, and track behaviour.
  • Continuous lead qualification: Use the marketing automation system to score the leads and assign points based on how sales-ready they are.
  • Hand-off sales-ready leads: Transfer sales-ready leads to D365 Sales. The sales team will have their details, plus unified data of their past behavior. They can now engage the leads based on where they are in the customer journey.
  • Personalized post-sale support: Share D365 Customer Insights and D365 Sales data with D365 Customer Service. Everyone, including customer service agents, has the customer’s entire data and history to offer relevant, timely, and personalized post-sale support.

No two implementations of marketing automation and CRM systems should be the same. At Coffee+Dunn, we ensure these systems are customized to meet your unique needs based on your business’s and industry’s unique customer journeys.

Use Cases of CRM with Marketing Automation

The possibilities unlocked by integrating your CRM with marketing automation are limited only by your imagination.

We have helped companies in several industries build infrastructure to create connected experiences, and have seen some interesting out-of-the-box use cases.

To jog your idea muscle, consider the following scenarios:

• • Events industry: Segment audiences based on past interests > send targeted ads for an upcoming event > confirm interest in the event and send details to sales team > automatically send follow-ups, event/session timing reminders to attendees > automatically pitch upsells based on past behavior.
  • Financial services: Capture leads and initiate a nurturing campaign with various pieces of content > track which pieces of content interest each lead > send timely, relevant offers automatically > pre-populate all prior engagement data before one-on-one sales calls > start a post-sale upsell sequence.

If the goal is to serve your customers better, then the unified data and automations you add to your CRM can only enhance the mission.

Top CRM Marketing Automation Tools

Several software vendors now provide CRMs with marketing automation capabilities or the ability to integrate with marketing platforms within their suite of apps.

The top vendors include:

• • Microsoft with Dynamics 365 applications
  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud
  • Pipedrive
  • HubSpot
  • Zoho

When it comes to CRMs and marketing automation tools, the vendor is just as important as the tool. It’s for this reason that we prefer Microsoft.

Customer engagement strategies are constantly evolving, and Microsoft’s commitment to continuous improvement ensures you’ll have a future-proof platform with the best of new marketing automation trends.

Also, many vendors offer marketing automation software and CRMs as standalone products, even if they support integrations.

Microsoft’s approach is different. They have built an interconnected ecosystem so you can get your CRM and marketing automation tools in one place. Here are the tools you’ll be using:

• • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
    • Dynamic 365 Sales
    • Dynamics 365 Customer Service
    • Dynamics 365 Field Service
  • CDP and Marketing Automation
    • Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 applications are designed to work together, which is the primary consideration when you want a CRM with marketing automation. That said, you can buy and use these apps individually or together.

How to Choose the Right CRM Marketing Automation Platform

The right CRM marketing automation platform for you depends mainly on your business needs. Here are the key considerations that will likely inform your decision.

• • Are there any legal/compliance considerations you must abide by? E.g., HIPAA for medics.
  • What’s your business size and budget? Some vendors charge per user/tenant per month.
  • What are your business goals and needs? Do you have a list of “must-have” features?
  • Do you want to test first before you buy? Many vendors have free trials.
  • Do you need any unique workflow or automation capabilities?

Also, the vendor’s partner ecosystem is vital. Does the vendor have approved partners you can turn to to help you implement and integrate the CRM and marketing automation platforms?

Microsoft does. We are Microsoft-certified consultants and architects, a Silver Microsoft Partner, and a 2X Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalist. In other words, we are a top-tier performer within the Microsoft Partner network.

Ready to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer engagement technologies with Coffee+Dunn by your side? Schedule your free consultation with our team today.

Common Challenges and Solutions

With proper planning, your implementation and integration of CRM and marketing automation platforms will likely succeed. Nonetheless, some challenges are to be expected. Here are some of the common issues and how to overcome them.

• • Change management problems: Breaking down departmental silos fundamentally transforms how an organization thinks and operates. You may face some resistance. You must effectively manage resistance to change.
  • Data quality issues: The new systems are only as good as the data you feed them. As the saying goes: garbage in, garbage out. It helps to start with a comprehensive data quality and governance plan.
  • Workflow automation problems: There’s a temptation to use default automation configurations in customer engagement technologies. This can be a problem as you won’t be focusing on your key objectives. Good workflow automation demands you map your business processes first to ensure the solution supports your workflows, not the other way around.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Let’s now answer some of the common questions we get about integrating CRMs and marketing automation software.

How Much Does It Typically Cost?

The cost of implementing CRM with marketing automation will depend on your chosen vendor. Here’s how much Microsoft charges for its applications:

• • D365 Sales Enterprise Edition – $105 per user per month, paid yearly
  • D365 Customer Service Professional – $50 per user per month, paid yearly
  • D365 Field Service – $105 per user per month, paid yearly
  • D365 Customer Insights – Starting at $1,700 per tenant per month, paid yearly. Cost depends on the number of profiles and “interacted people” in your database.

Also, consider budgeting for a Microsoft Partner like Coffee+Dunn to help you implement the services to maximize their business value and ROI.

What Types of Businesses Benefit Most From CRM and Marketing Automation Integration?

Any business with an elaborate sales cycle or high-value customers that need strong relationship management skills will benefit from CRM and marketing automation integration.

Examples of industries we serve include:

• • Business services
  • Manufacturing
  • Education

How Long Does It Take to Implement a CRM and Marketing Automation System?

Implementation time varies and depends on business size, volume of data to be migrated, business complexity, and how long it takes to get key stakeholders up to speed with the new systems.

That said, with a strong implementation partner like Coffee+Dunn, you can accelerate the rollout process – completing tasks in just a few weeks, which would have otherwise taken months.

Looking Forward

As we’ve established, CRM with marketing automation offers powerful solutions to some common business challenges, such as time-consuming manual workflows, fragmented data, and misaligned sales and marketing teams.

Your team can now deliver end-to-end connected customer experiences. However, to truly unlock the power of this new arrangement, you need more than just software.

At Coffee+Dunn, we help businesses leverage the full power of customer engagement technologies by taking a holistic approach that puts your business goals first.

Schedule a free consultation with our team today to see how we can help you align your business goals with technology requirements.