CRM companies in Sri Lanka understand the vital role that CX plays to engage, satisfy and even retain customers for the long haul. Through offering custom applications that are cloud-based and scalable, software development companies in Sri Lanka have been catering to local and international clients alike. As competition heightens in a fierce marketplace, most businesses are left scrambling as they try to understand their customers for generating the engagement and revenue they need to sustain.
After all, the right customer insights are crucial towards not just crafting the right messaging, but enhancing existing product/service offerings to align customer demands with business growth. Well integrated and scalable CRM software solutions can definitely help businesses facilitate what’s necessary to satisfy customer needs. By incorporating important features such as 360-degree customer profiling, lead management and campaign automation, the right CRM can end up being a treasure trove of valuable insights, especially once it is established as a go-to resource for sales and marketing teams within your organisation.
At EFutures, we understand the optimum value a suitable custom CRM can add to any business, irrespective of size or industry. As a software development company in Sri Lanka, we aim to understand business requirements, no matter how unique or niche, to build custom solutions that our clients can depend on for their own growth and performance. In this article, we outline the key benefits of CRM and Marketing Automation integration, and how your business can get started with building a customer-centric solution that empowers employees to delight customers at every interaction.
Smooth and consistent customer journeys are a key benefit of any CRM and Marketing Automation integration, as both applications can now serve data to one another for understanding customers better. CRM solutions in Sri Lanka are well aware of this, and therefore pay prime focus towards removing silos between sales and marketing teams, by integrating their software effectively.
As customer data flows between CRM and Marketing Automation systems on a real-time basis, sales and marketing teams can identify how to approach prospective customers that would’ve already interacted with your business. For example, customers that showed interest towards a specific variant of the same product during an advertising campaign can be approached again for a one-on-one pitch by sales teams, with the same product variant in mind. This makes sales outreach efforts far more targeted and offers a greater chance of eventual conversion, as opposed to approaching prospects with a broader scope (or worse yet, with no scope at all).
On the other hand, experiences had by sales teams can be recorded on a customer’s profile for future reference, both by other sales executives as well as marketing specialists who would’ve targeted specific demographics within an existing prospect base during a campaign. As a result, CRM and Marketing Automation integrations can significantly help bridge gaps in customer behavioural patterns, interests and preferences, so teams can precisely deliver what truly brings value to their customers’ lives.
As CRM and Marketing Automation integrations facilitate the seamless flow of data from one application to another, the issue of duplicate data entry is eliminated thanks to real-time data sync. Add to this a functionality such as version control, and all team members now have access to the latest data, sans any kind of duplication. As employees are freed from the task of entering the same data multiple times, they are now better positioned to focus on tasks that demand more productive use of their time and skills.
Eliminating duplicate data entry does not mean that certain team members could be restricted from accessing the resources they need to perform their daily duties. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) can generate granular access permissions, so any team member (be they in-house or external) can be granted access to the data they need, either only for viewing or for editing.
Additionally, maintaining databases wherein every datapoint is unique signifies clean, accurate data; something that is a requisite for data analytics and business intelligence. In turn, clean and accurate data shall offer insights of an equal calibre, thereby making the quality of your insights reliable for aiding overall business decisions.
Integrating CRM with Marketing Automation software opens up vast potential for data-driven insights, out of which problem detection is a key outcome. Unlike siloed platforms, CRM integrated with Marketing Automation can assist teams in identifying root causes of unmet KPIs pertaining to engagement, conversion and even sentiment, through customer data collected in a single module, or across both applications.
For example, the sales team being able to attribute a drop in the quality of leads to a mistargeted demographic during the previous lead generation campaign can be correctly identified with integrated CRM and Marketing Automation software. While disparate software applications can still identify such issues, it is bound to take significantly longer, owing to a lack of centralised customer profiles and databases. Likewise, other gaps and issues surrounding sales and marketing performance can be correctly pinpointed through integrated CRM and Marketing Automation platforms, so your team will always be able to seek feedback when needed to know whether their efforts are appropriately aligned towards your business’s end goals, and if not, how they can be corrected for better results.
This goes hand-in-hand with the previous point of building consistent customer journeys. However, customer insights derived from both CRM and Marketing Automation platforms on an aggregate basis can deliver value that goes beyond sales, marketing and other customer-facing departments within your business. Such insights can extend to other business units such as product development, technical support and even supply chain management, as customer preferences and dislikes can determine how these departments can realign their duties to serve customers better.
CX has now moved beyond simply being a responsibility that is borne by customer service teams, and one that is now shared by every department and employee in an organisation. Customer insights from CRM and Marketing Automation integrations shall pave the way for understanding whether every team member across your entire company is doing what is useful to attract and retain customers, or if they need to recalibrate their existing duties to contribute better towards revenue and growth.
Before you embark on integrating your CRM and Marketing Automation software, you need to know what is ailing your sales and marketing teams. Encourage a productive discussion around such issues, by involving key team members and asking them about the problems they face during their daily sales and marketing outreach efforts. Whether it’s gaps in data or unmanageable bottlenecks, build a brief that collates all this feedback so your software development team knows what to refer to once they jump into the task of integrating your CRM and Marketing Automation applications for you.
If your CRM and Marketing Automation platforms are both disparate applications that have entirely been made from scratch, then your software development team also needs to be completely tasked with the project of integrating the two. However, if either one or both of these platforms are third-party tools, then your software development team will need to coordinate with said vendors for ensuring a smooth and hassle-free integration. Some vendors may be easier to integrate than others, especially if they are SaaS applications and purchasing a bigger software package or add-on is all that is needed.
Nonetheless, it is imperative to have your software development team and your external software vendor(s) closely coordinate on the CRM – Marketing Automation integration process, so that all existing data and processes are correctly migrated, and your teams don’t have to face unexpected lapses post implementation.
Once integrations are complete and have been implemented for use, your software development team as well as business employees should continue to keep an eye on the workings of your newly integrated CRM and Marketing Automation platforms. This way, any errors or silos can be quickly remedied, while any gaps in functionality can be filled with modules that can offer the features teams need to do their best work.
CRM and Marketing Automation software integrations can make all the difference between a good CX strategy and a great one that always has its customers’ preferences in prime focus. Integrated CRM and Marketing Automation software can also remove silos, by enabling a real-time flow of the latest data from one application to another, so both sales and marketing teams are notified on updates as they happen.
By centralising all customer data that is within reach for both applications, businesses can sync sales and marketing efforts, so that everything from brand positioning to messaging is crafted and delivered in a consistent manner, to achieve optimised CX.