Centralise your marketing and sales processes into one system
Today we want to take a moment to praise all-in-one marketing and sales platforms: those in which you combine all your marketing and sales tools in one suite that incorporates anything from CRM to marketing automation, email marketing, and online ad management. While point solutions, for example for sales engagement and marketing automation, are often also very cool (and in most cases certainly a lot cheaper), today we want to show what we think is great about integrated marketing and sales suites.
Integrated marketing and sales suites, or all-in-one platforms, are subscription-based tools that act as a hub for all your marketing and sales processes. They combine the functions of different tools into one platform so you can do everything from content creation to lead generation and CRM management in one place. Moreover, their integrated database enables many supporting activities such as campaign management, data analysis and reporting. So it is no wonder that these integrated marketing and sales suites are an increasingly popular way to increase efficiency and streamline processes.
You can manage leads throughout their entire lifecycle in one place while keeping track of every interaction they’ve had with your company along the way — regardless of which channel they came through first. As they integrate various marketing and sales tools in one place, you can save considerable time managing and reporting on your campaigns.
You can do more with fewer resources by centralising your data into a single system. This is especially true for companies using multiple tools from different vendors that don’t integrate well together. For example, if you use Pipedrive for CRM and Mailchimp for email and automation, it will take more effort to have full visibility and full use of data in both systems. In addition, with different tools sending data to each other via a connector, you run the risk of duplicating data, or data mismatches. For example, you may have a contact that exists in both your CRM and your email tool, but if they do not integrate properly, or it is not possible to synchronise all data points at all times, errors can occur when a modification is manually made to the contact in, for example, the CRM.
These risks are therefore preventable by using an all-in-one platform, like HubSpot. With them, you can manage leads throughout their entire lifecycle in one place while keeping track of every interaction they’ve had with your company along the way — regardless of which channel they came through first. As they integrate various marketing and sales tools in one place, you can save considerable time managing and reporting on your campaigns. As an example, it will be much easier to report on how different channels — such as email, social media and paid advertising — work together to drive revenue. This information can help you make better decisions about where and how to spend your budget.
Improving efficiency for both marketing and sales
While in themselves they may not solve the age-old problem of marketing and sales alignment, we do believe that these all-in-one platforms support better communication and collaboration between teams. Because of their integrated nature, they allow multiple departments, i.e sales and marketing, to better share information and work together on campaigns. This can help make sure everyone is working toward the same goals by giving everyone access to the same information about leads’ and customers’ needs and preferences.
As these integrated platforms are designed to be used in tandem by both marketing teams and sales teams, there is no need for multiple software tools and processes to be used separately. The result is greater efficiency for both departments, which saves time and money. Marketing teams can use data from the sales process, such as the type of leads that move quickly through the funnel and eventually convert, and sales can use historical data from marketing touchpoints, content consumed, and interests of their leads. Instead of sales being handed a list of names that marketing claims are really good leads, they can see each lead’s history and qualification directly in their CRM. The joint view of marketing and sales on a single connected acquisition process ensures that as a company you better understand the needs of your leads and customers.
Especially in B2B, sales cycles that are long and require multiple touch points with different contacts in the decision making unit, good coordination between marketing and sales is essential. With a single platform as the central hub for your commercial activities, your team can efficiently manage customer relationships across multiple channels and marketing and sales can work together more effectively. This also makes it easier to provide a consistent experience with well-streamlined messaging that spans different departments.
Better data insights and performance optimisation
Another important benefit of a fully integrated marketing and sales suite is that it allows for better tracking and analysis. These platforms allow you to track your data across multiple channels in one place so you can make smarter decisions based on clear numbers without having to mix and match different reports from multiple tools. This can help you see where your efforts are paying off (and where they aren’t) so you can adjust accordingly. For example, if a specific marketing initiative generates a lot of leads, but those leads don’t ultimately convert into customers, you can detect that in your analysis of the entire acquisition funnel rather than just relying on the initial results that said initiative generates a lot of leads. A holistic view of the entire buyer journey from first click to won deal, without concerns about whether the data is complete or duplicated, is extremely valuable in scaling up growing businesses.
A holistic view of the entire buyer journey from first click to won deal, without concerns about whether the data is complete or duplicated, is extremely valuable in scaling up growing businesses.
With all of their features bundled into one solution, these tools allow for a holistic view of the B2B buyer during their complete lifecycle. All-in-one platforms allow you to see the big picture across all departments in real time so that you can make smarter decisions about where to allocate resources next. With this kind of visibility into what’s happening across the organisation — both internally and externally — it’s much easier to optimise your marketing strategy and increase future revenue opportunities through better customer targeting. This enables both marketing and sales to build stronger relationships with prospects and customers by providing a more personalised experience that aligns with their needs at each step in the buyer journey.
Integrations with other tools outside your platform
Although the whole argument we’re making for these all-in-one tools is that you don’t need to connect so many tools to each other anymore, you may still have to connect a few tools outside of your marketing and sales ecosystem to it. Think for example of the tools you use for project management or financial management. In many cases, all-in-one platforms integrate seamlessly with other systems, so that data can be accessed across multiple departments rather than being confined within one single silo.
The advantage remains that it then only takes a single connection to your integrated suite for this tool to be able to use all available data. Your project management team can receive all relevant information directly from the CRM with a single click, and you do not need to bring together information from different tools. In addition, support for integrations with widely-used tools, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, is much higher than for all smaller point solutions. Chances are, your project management tool has created its own native connection to connect to HubSpot and is already available in the HubSpot app marketplace.
