It’s important to keep your marketing team firing on all cylinders to

  • Bring in high quality leads
  • Position your offering in the best possible way
  • Raise your profile and spread brand awareness in the most important channels and
  • Ensure that your funnels remain full and flourishing.

To achieve this, they need the right tools to help them maximize effectiveness and efficiency. 

And a CRM software could be the key to unlocking unprecedented marketing potential. While a CRM is most widely used by sales teams, its applications in marketing enable you to gain a single source of truth about your prospects and customers. Further, a marketing CRM tool with sales capabilities is key to uniting your sales and marketing teams.

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Why is a Marketing CRM Important?

 

Your marketing team works hard to produce the very best results from limited marketing budgets. Their effort to generate good quality leads who are likely to convert to paying customers, keeps your business turning over. 

To achieve this, marketing professionals have to assume many roles and responsibilities, often all within the same afternoon! For example:

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This list could very easily be extended, so marketing teams need to bring their A-game, each and every day. 

What’s helping them flex these seemingly superhuman powers? Most teams will rely on an array of tools to help them to achieve the many tasks such as 

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And the list goes on.

Joining The Dots, Enabling Attribution

With so many resources being invested into your marketing efforts, you would want to ensure that you’re getting the desired results.

So whether you are looking to calculate the marketing contribution to the overall revenue, or just pull up reports to show individual campaign performance, you need to connect the dots across multiple systems to understand the bigger picture.

But at the end of the day, you have no visibility into the status of the leads passed to the sales team and struggle to calculate your impact on revenue. Ultimately, you’re left in a frustrating situation, constantly depending on the sales teams for a progress report. 

As a result, attributing to the marketing spends and revenue becomes challenging. 

All of this amounts to an undervalued team that struggles to gain the recognition and budgets they require and deserve.

Related Article: Best practices to resolve the friction between your sales and marketing teams

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The Solution? A Comprehensive CRM.

 

It needn’t be this way. And with an intelligent marketing CRM solution, it no longer has to be.

A marketing CRM system brings the functionality of multiple marketing tools into one comprehensive platform. 

Not only are your various solutions interlinked and easily accessible (no more tiresome switching between systems) – your team will also gain much-needed visibility into the ongoing performance of MQLs as they’re passed on to Sales.

 

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Knowing the status of the marketing leads aligns Marketing and Sales teams, improving communication, cooperation and helping you attribute revenue to the right sources. Perhaps most importantly of all, you’re gaining a comprehensive understanding of your customer. 

With easy access and better visibility of the audience that you’re courting, a CRM helps your marketing team to hone their offering, improve their communication and add real finesse to the way that they approach leads, as they are nurtured towards successful conversion.

Let’s find out how a marketing CRM tool helps you achieve this.

Benefits of a Marketing CRM

 

We’ve established that a CRM system can bring significant improvements when it comes to inter-departmental alignment and better internal leverage of data. But the opportunities don’t end there.

Let's dive into some of the specific ways in which a marketing CRM can bring tangible benefits to your wider business.

 

Create More Opportunities for Your Business

 

A good marketing CRM tool provides many ways to identify and generate opportunities for your business. With a marketing CRM like Freshworks CRM, you can 

  • Effortlessly create landing pages from scratch using the intuitive drag-and-drop landing page editor or choose from a library of inbuilt templates.
  • Track the visitor journey across your website, use heatmaps to learn what CTAs work, and optimize it to engage visitors further.
  • Attract and engage with leads using interactive chatbots. Known to help convert leads faster, and encourage optimal user engagement via the speediest support, chatbots have so much to offer.
  • Capture lead information automatically into the CRM. Web forms help remove all barriers to that all-important initial contact, at the same time as ensuring lead data is instantly accessible.

Learn more about Marketing CRM capabilities

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Accelerate Conversations With Personalized Engagement 

Personalization has never mattered more in marketing, and for maximum impact, you should implement it from the earliest stage of engagement.

A marketing CRM solution can enable the attention to detail that you need for the best results.

  • Segment leads into targeted lists based on geolocation, behaviour, recent website clicks, stage of lifecycle and so much more. This enables you to provide perfectly targeted messaging that lands.
  • Engage and nurture leads by designing and delivering targeted emails and campaigns. Your CRM solution can help develop clear pathways to funnel your leads from the first touch through to conversion.
  • Work with customized email and newsletter templates, designed to deliver maximum engagement, but flexible enough to work beautifully in line with your own branding and segmented message.
  • Schedule campaigns to be sent at a time that’s optimized for the timezone of the recipient, to help ensure the best opening rates.
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Fill Your Pipeline With High-Quality Leads

 

Whether you’re a growing business or have numerous leads, in order to scale quickly, you need to differentiate the piping hot leads from the ice-cold ones.

Otherwise, it's not only time and energy that's wasted, but also viable opportunities that go unnoticed because the leads weren't prioritized.

An intelligent marketing CRM enables you to 

  • Learn how to prioritize your leads by harnessing the power of lead and contact scoring: Built-in, AI-based lead scoring can help you effortlessly identify the most interested leads and invest in them accordingly.
  • Take advantage of the easy collaboration enabled by your CRM solution. Pass on leads to salespeople from within the platform, easily and efficiently, whilst retaining full visibility of the way that they progress.
  • Allocate your resources in a data-driven manner. Auto assign leads to the right salespeople based on geolocation, product, team and more.
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Gain Greater Visibility Into Leads

 

When it comes to our customers, knowledge is power. And a good CRM will give you a panoramic view of each and every lead that you capture.

Enjoy 360-degree vision, with instantly accessible and well-organized data at your fingertips.

  • Get an instant overview of all previous interactions via email, phone, chat, SMS etc. This is invaluable when it comes to obtaining rapid context and understanding of a specific lead.
  • Contact management helps you to benefit from a chronological view of prospects’ recent activities with your business. Understand patterns of behaviour and provide contextually relevant and perfectly timed marketing messaging as a result.
  • Easily access recent notes, appointments and tasks to get an inside view of activity spanning both marketing and sales teams.
  • Get instant appreciation for the lifecycle stage of any lead, and foster better customer relationships by acting in accordance with this information.
  • Have deal information at your fingertips, from which stage the deal is currently positioned at, right through to the eventual deal value.

And more! Learn more about managing leads using CRM 

 

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Make Fully Informed, Data-Driven Decisions

 

When it comes to getting the most out of your marketing efforts, arming yourself with properly collected and clearly presented data is essential. Make better decisions, see better results.

Working with a marketing CRM gives you full control of your reporting and analysis so that you can gain clarity down to a truly granular level.

  • Learn what’s working and what isn’t. A marketing CRM will give you the ability to rapidly create reports helping to measure your marketing impact. Replicate, adjust or abandon tactics with confidence.
  • Analyze high-performing marketing lists. See which of your email lists are getting you the best results, so that you can capitalize on the interest (and replicate similar strategies elsewhere.)
  • Determine campaigns’ engagement by measuring open, click, and reply metrics, engagement over different geographies, devices, and more.
  • Analyze individual campaign’s performance by drilling down into a wide range of success metrics. Assess open and click rates, segments, email clients, top performing links, and the most active subscribers who respond to them.
  • Identify sources that contribute to growth. Attribute revenue to the right campaigns and sources, and use this information to make wider ranging improvements.

And more! Find out what insights you get with a marketing CRM 

 

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Choosing the Right Marketing CRM

Business use case

Assess your company size and requirements from the CRM. While choosing a CRM, make sure it fits right into your business ecosystem and solves all your use cases.

Budget

Once you understand your business requirement, determine the pricing structure that’ll suit you best. Watch out for hidden costs in terms of support, maintenance, and implementation.

Scalability

When your business grows, so do your requirements. A sophisticated CRM with pay-as-you-grow pricing should support your business needs as it scales. 

Ease of use

You need a CRM that makes your life easier. So choose a marketing CRM that is simple and intuitive. It shouldn’t make you roam around the software to get work done.

Customer reviews

As you narrow down your list of ideal CRMs, make sure to check trusted review websites, such as G2 and Capterra, to get first-hand reviews from the existing customer base.

Looking for a Marketing CRM?

Try Freshworks CRM (formerly Freshsales), a cloud-based CRM for your marketing teams. Freshworks CRM helps businesses scale faster and puts refreshing business software in the hands of small businesses, as well as enterprises. 

If you’re looking for an easy-to-adopt, ready-to-use CRM (plus a 21-day free trial to start off with), we’ve got you covered.

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