How distributors can use marketing automation and CRM together

In our post on how to use marketing automation software as a distributor, we covered what marketing automation software is and how you can use it to grow your business. We’re going to back up a bit because it’s important to understand the difference between marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software, and how the two work together.

While CRM and marketing automation systems are complementary, they both serve different functions. Much like your sales and marketing teams, they only really reach their full potential when paired together.

CRM is primarily a sales tool, focused on collecting data about existing customers and managing new customers and sales opportunities.

Marketing automation is the marketing counterpart, focused on new lead generation.

Industry software like commonsku has CRM which allows you to create company profiles, add contacts, track notes, calls, and meetings, set reminders for follow-ups and keep a history of presentations, estimates, sales orders, and invoices. Within the company details of each client, you have the ability to add a status and/or a tag which allows you to keep your sales funnel organized and also makes pulling reports simple.

Having a marketing automation platform, like Mailchimp or HubSpot, that integrates with your CRM ensures that all the information your sales and marketing teams need will all be in one place, easily accessible, editable, and manageable.

Here are two ways CRM and marketing automation can work together:

Use statuses to move leads down the sales funnel

If you have identified some companies you’d like to work with but you haven’t had much contact with them, you can status them as “Dream Company” and then set up a drip campaign that will send a series of emails that include calls to action to start a project, for example. You will be able to monitor open rates, click-through rates and see what emails are working and what aren’t.

Create email campaigns using tags

Do you have a bunch of really fun products that universities and colleges would love? You could send out a back-to-school email campaign to leads that have been tagged with “college” “university” or “school” that showcases these products. You can use merge tags to personalize the message to a specific contact and school and direct these tagged contacts to a dedicated landing page with a call to action unique to the campaign.

There are so many ways you can leverage your CRM to work with marketing automation so your sales and marketing teams can work together like a well-oiled machine, whether your focus is on retention, growth or customer satisfaction. You can learn more about our marketing integrations with the Mailchimp or Hubspot platforms.

Note for commonsku customers: commonsku has launched integrations with both Mailchimp and HubSpot. Having Mailchimp and HubSpot integrated with commonsku CRM means all of your leads information would be in one place, and easy for your sales and marketing teams to edit and manage. These integrations will allow you to sync your contacts from commonsku to Mailchimp/HubSpot and send commonsku contacts newsletters or enter them into workflows from Mailchimp/HubSpot plus use any of the other features available in those apps. Ultimately your marketing automation platform of choice would work with commonsku to make a complete sales and marketing solution.