Marketing

3 min read

Why Marketing Automation is Critical to Your Sales Process

The sales and marketing departments often encounter difficulty capturing data and increasing transparency between marketing and sales activity. Historically, those two departments have had a wall between them. CRM applications tend to be a sales-driven tool and is where sales spend their day. Without a marketing automation platform, marketers may be using 20 different applications to manage everything from social media to visitor tracking to email campaigns. There are many tools out there for marketing, but they are siloed and do not integrate fully with the CRM systems. When these applications are walled-off from each other, it encourages the disconnect between sales and marketing. Some of these challenges include:

• Too many unqualified leads are entered into the CRM system, causing disorganization, and an increased chance of the quality leads falling through the cracks
• Marketing activity is not fully integrated with the CRM system, causing a lack of visibility to the sales rep’s meaningful data
• Lack of data to segment customers appropriately
• Difficulty tracking ROI and effectiveness of campaigns

Transparency between sales and marketing is not the only challenge to overcome. A significant part of the buyer’s journey may be completed before sales engagement because of all the online content available to buyers. Unless sales can engage buyers earlier in the journey, they are operating at a disadvantage. Marketing automation software, such as Sugar Market, help companies attract new opportunities, convert them into customers, and nurture them into relationships. Here are a handful of Sugar Market features that will enhance sales and marketing collaboration:

1. Easy to use dashboards
2. Send, track, and measure email campaigns
3. Sync marketing lists from SugarCRM and segment data on any field in SugarCRM
4. Automate Sugar tasks and opportunity creation from Sugar Market
5. Use nurture-based workflow and trigger logic tools
6. Manage online and offline events
7. Track website visitors and analytics
8. Publish, manage, and track social media content
9. Score leads for prioritization

However, not only marketing automation tools matter in this dynamic. Sales automation software is equally important. Sugar Sell was built with your sales team’s needs in mind, enhancing cross-departmental transparency and collaboration. It also empowers your marketing team to craft an articulated story about your company’s customers and their needs. Here are some key features that will enhance cross-departmental collaboration:

• Customer interaction transparency
• Reporting dashboards for strategic decisions
• Sales forecasting
• Seamless integration with Sugar Market, for quick access to marketing resources, without leaving your CRM

Sugar Sell and Sugar Market working together will help your company keep the sales funnel running while enabling your marketing department to generate better, more effective marketing content. 

If you have questions or would like to learn more about integrating marketing automation with your CRM system, contact us today.

Sarah Friedlander Garcia As the Senior Director, Brand & Content Marketing at SugarCRM, Sarah manages a team of talented marketers focused on brand, content strategy, digital asset creation, corporate brand execution, social media, and internal communications. When not living and breathing marketing, Sarah enjoys traveling, baking, performance flute and piccolo and spending time with her family.