There is no end of reasons why Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management go hand in hand. This is mainly due to the fact that they both aim towards similar goals: Marketing automation software is designed to build and nurture interest and CRM manages the engagement and follow up of that interest. Marketing automation is a division of CRM that focuses on streamlining, scheduling, segmentation and the tracking of inbound and outbound marketing campaigns that will then generate leads and gain the interest of prospects and existing customers allowing the business to be productive and profitable. The role of the CRM is to then take over from the Marketing Automation once the prospect or customer is a ‘hot lead’.
The real gold comes in the form of intelligence to the sales employees. Since every interaction and engagement with email campaigns, webinar attendance, website tracking activity amongst a few – can all generate a behaviour score which is synchronised directly in the CRM. Employees in sales are no longer shooting in the dark with regards to which prospects they choose to spend their time on. They are now laser focused. They know which web pages have been of interest to the prospect. They know which prospects have a higher level of engagement. They know where to focus their time.
So why Act-On and SugarCRM?
They are both leading solutions in their sector, Act-On generates the leads and manages the lead nurturing and SugarCRM manages those created relationships and sales activities.
Act-On and SugarCRM have different capabilities however when they are used in conjunction with each other they form a mighty tool. Act-On will give you vision into the leads behaviours and interests, but without SugarCRM in place, the prospect-to-customer progress will be undocumented and unreportable.
These tools together can help the marketing team and senior leadership understand which marketing efforts are generating revenue with true end-to-end reporting. Google Analytics can only track so far, and that stops when you have business opportunities to progress through the sales funnel in CRM. Act-On and Sugar together will track exactly which opportunities have been won against the various inbound/outbound efforts. We at Sugabyte now understand which Adwords campaigns have attributed to real opportunities being won.
Coupling the two platforms brings a host of benefits; businesses are able to better understand their pipeline by understanding exactly where leads and prospects are in the funnel allowing sales teams to better target and nurture and convert a higher percentage of prospects into sales.
