Integrating marketing and sales data has been a key initiative for many WebFX clients in recent years. In theory, the more integrated your marketing and sales data and processes become, the more efficient your business will be. Integrating these departments that have historically been disjointed comes at a cost, but the benefits that come from it will significantly outweigh those if done right. Pairing your sales CRM and marketing datasets has been one of the highest impact areas we’ve seen in the industry in recent years.
Benefits of Integrating Your Marketing and Sales Data
Marketing and sales data, when integrated, come with some significant benefits. I’ll walk through them below.
ROI Reporting
What C-level executives wouldn’t want to know the return on investment of their company’s different marketing initiatives? When you take your marketing data, stored in platforms like MarketingCloudFX, and pair it with your CRM data, specifically your deals or opportunities, you can easily calculate the ROI of lead-driving channels such as SEO, PPC, Social Media, Email, and Affiliate marketing.
Having clear-cut ROI numbers streamlines your reporting, allows you to gain buy-in for additional marketing budget, and even can be used to drive your overall marketing strategy to keep focus on the channels that are bringing your business the most return.
Better Ad Performance
Ad campaigns on platforms like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook can see drastic improvements in lead quality when fed good data. At WebFX, we offer Lead Quality Bidding Pipelines, which allow us to sync both conversion data and audience data to these platforms.
Conversion pipelines, also known as offline conversions, essentially allow you to feed CRM data back to these ad platforms. Over time, instead of your campaign targeting on-site conversions such as contact forms or phone calls, your ad campaigns will actually begin to target users who are likely to make it further into your sales funnel, such as when they become a sales qualified lead, or even a closed won opportunity/deal.
Audience pipelines are also extremely impactful. They allow you to target past qualified leads, those who have open opportunities/deals in your CRM, and in platforms like Facebook, you can even create lookalikes of your audiences to reach new prospects who are similar to those in your audience list. The coolest part about audience feeds is you can take contacts generated from any channel, and target them with other digital efforts. For example, a contact you met at a tradeshow could be added to your Facebook campaign for retargeting, creating a true omnichannel approach to marketing.
When using our lead quality bidding pipeline features (both conversion & audience feeds) many clients have seen a 25%+ boost in Sales Qualified Leads driven by their ad campaigns within a 6-month window. What sales team wouldn’t want an increase in lead quality? It’ll make their job easier. The coolest part of this is that the feedback of “quality” isn’t made up by the marketing department, it comes directly from the sales team using their CRM efficiently.
These strategies have proven effective for over 100 WebFX clients. In fact, we even use these in our own marketing efforts as they help reduce wasted spend and show our ads to those who align closely with our ideal customer persona.
Higher Lead Close Rates and More Business Revenue
The biggest win of them all is that when you integrate your sales CRM information with your marketing dataset, your organization can see higher close rates and more revenue. Integrating your data can help align your messaging across both departments in many ways, leading to a streamlined customer experience and a higher likelihood they choose your company over a competitor.
This takes a lot of work, but the benefits are worth it. Below is just an example of some of the things you can do when you pair this data.
Let’s imagine someone clicks on your Google Ad and fills out a form on your site requesting a quote for your product/service. With no additional work, and your sales and marketing team going about their day as normal (once these are set up), you could:
- Score the lead based on website engagement, the data submitted, and more, so the sales team knows whether or not it a hot lead that needs immediate attention
- Enter that user in a drip campaign to email them key information prior to the sales team member reaching out
In the case above, we’re using marketing data to impact the beginning of the sales process, which is great, but with a feedback loop from the CRM, the integration becomes even more powerful. Once the sales team member talks with the prospect and quotes their project in the CRM, imagine the following:
- That data feeds to your ad campaigns to target the user until they’re marked as closed won in the CRM
- The email drip campaign tailors messaging based on the stage a contact is at within the CRM
- The website experience becomes personalized with content that supports the sales team’s messaging on calls and emails with the prospect
- The qualified lead data is fed to ad platforms to help target other future prospects that are qualified
- Marketing can see exactly what channel drove the opportunity to report on opportunity value driven from different channels
- The sales team can become notified as the user engages with the website, emails, and advertisements the marketing team is serving to prospects during the sales process and they can tailor their communication accordingly
- and more!
Now let’s say that prospect decides to move forward with buying your product or service. There’s even more value you can drive from them, such as:
- Automate a review reminder asking the customer to leave you a review on platforms like Google Business Page or Facebook.
- Add them to your email list to send them your monthly newsletter to keep your brand top of mind.
- Tailor your website messaging via website personalization to speak to your customers differently than an average visitor. You can easily change calls to action, images, and more to push users to products/services they may need down the line based on what they already purchased.
- Enter the user into an email drip campaign to reengage them in products/services they may need down the line.
- Help report on ROI for the marketing channel that drove the lead originally
As you can see, integrating these processes and datasets can lead to a great sales experience for your customers, drive more qualified leads for your business, and ultimately result in larger revenue numbers on a year-to-year basis.
What Are The Keys To Integrating This Data?
As mentioned above, there are many benefits to integrating your data, however, they come at a cost. Luckily, with most of the marketing automation mentioned above, after the initial lift is complete, these automations work for you, almost as free labor.
However, there are 5 key factors that you must consider and iron out prior to reaping the benefits. They are outlined below!
1 – Good and consistent sales processes
The most common roadblock I see for companies looking to integrate their CRM data and marketing data is inconsistent sales processes leading to messy data. If your team isn’t following clear-cut processes such as opening an opportunity in the CRM when they quote a project or associating your contact/company data to the opportunities, then simply put this won’t work. The sales team needs to have consistent sales processes for each employee to follow, otherwise, the “Triggers” you build to integrate data simply won’t fire as they should, causing jumbled data and untimely messaging showing to your prospects.
2 – Great marketing data foundation
Similar to how the sales team must have a great foundation of processes, your marketing data must also be bulletproof. With inconsistencies in your marketing data, or even data missing from your dataset, the integration could lose much of it’s impact.
On every website, prior to worrying about integrating data, you need to ensure:
- All forms are tracked, along with their marketing source, medium, campaign, pageviews, ad click ID, submission data, etc.
- All phone calls are tracked, along with their source, medium, campaign, ad click id, transciprts, etc.
- There are no conversion loopholes on your website/marketing funnel. These would be ways users could become a lead without it being tracked, for example, an email in your website footer or a Google Ad Call Asset not using a call tracking number.
3 – Team Buy In
Team buy-in is essential to making this work. Since the process impacts many departments, this can sometimes be a big roadblock, especially at larger organizations. When you plan on starting this process, it’s important to get buy-in from all involved stakeholders. This may involve:
- Owners/Executives
- Department leads for sales and marketing
- The CRM Admin
- The Security Team (or legal)
- The marketing and sales staff
Without a full team buy-in, the process can become elongated with roadblocks in approvals, implementation, and more.
4 – Technology
A key to integrating your data is choosing the right technology. For example, if you choose a cheap CRM option, then find out it doesn’t have any available integrations, it’s not going to be possible to integrate this data without doing so manually. As your business evolves, when choosing new technology for things like meeting scheduling to live chat support, you need to consider “does this tool integrate with others I’m using?” If the answer to that question is no, you may want to explore other options. Common red flags with software are:
- No API or Webhooks available to integrate data
- Software built custom or in-house
- Software targeting a specific niche industry (these often don’t play friendly with others)
- Software that is poorly reviewed on sites like G2, Capterra, and SoftwareAdvice.
- Software that isn’t found on integration platforms like workato, zapier, or tray.io.
5 – Budget
The last thing you need to consider is your budget. Marketing automation tools can save you a lot of time and make your business money, but there will always be an upfront cost to set up these platforms and integrate them into your processes.
With robust websites and tech, the process of integrating your data can easily take 6 or more months. They are no small projects, and if tackling in-house you’ll need to consider the scope of the project and your team’s capacity.
The main things impacting the cost of these projects include:
- Monthly/annual fees of the tech you’re using for marketing and sales (marketing automation platform, CRM, live chat, call tracking, etc.)
- Monthly/annual fees of the tech you’re using to integrate (eg. workato, zapier, etc.)
- Hourly rate any consultants, architects, or developers you need to integrate this data and estimates of time needed to complete the project
- The cost of your internal employees supporting the project
Though the costs are typically outweighed by the benefits (otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be doing this), budget is something to consider early on when exploring your data integration project.
Questions About Data Integration for Your Marketing and Sales Teams?
If you have any questions about data integration and what it can do for your business, contact us today for a free quote. At WebFX, we offer data integration services for small-to-mid-size businesses so the lift and effort is significantly reduced for your team. We also offer a proprietary software, MarketingCloudFX, that offers a native CRM and integration of sales and marketing tools. Contact us online to learn more and request a tour of the platform!