Your Customer Relationship Management platform may not be working hard enough for you.
Customer management systems are software solutions designed to give businesses a clear picture of their relationship with customers. But the businesses sometimes neglect the platform’s marketing functions.
That’s the view of Insightly automationOpens a new window , a Silicon Valley start-up that’s one of the top developers of CRM sales-marketing platforms, and many of its customers.
440 businesses surveyed
Insightly conducted a surveyOpens a new window in August of 440 CRM client-businesses and concluded that while most consider marketing important, slightly more than half — 56% — are still using Excel spreadsheets to record their marketing activities rather than automation technology which could streamline them.
Another 17% are not using any technology at all.
And while integration of sales and marketing initiatives are considered by many to be key to their company’s success, 42% say the initiatives are integrated only occasionally and 11% not at all.
Insightly used the survey to publicize the launch of Insightly MarketingOpens a new window , a software analytics service that integrates marketing, sales and project management applications into a single platform.
The service makes Insightly the latest CRM provider to recognize that its platform should be running marketing apps for a company’s marketing team as well as managing the company’s sales relationships.
“Business today must address the complete customer, and that means understanding the intricacies and value of each touchpoint,†said Anthony Smith, the company’s chief executive.
Vital but unrelated to sales
Underneath the umbrella of marketing sits a wide range of diverse activities carried out by businesses which also may never touch the sales process or touch it only slightly. Among these are public relations, website management and email marketing.
A majority of the businesses polled by Insightly said their marketing departments contain five or fewer people. And 42% said their marketing budgets accounted for less than 10% of their annual revenue.
The survey paints a picture of companies using CRMs within their sales or revenue-generating activities but leaving their marketing departments out in the cold. It points to an opportunity for CRM developers to add additional marketing functions to their technology, as have done Insightly, Zoho and other CRM companies.
Win-win for one customer
There are two wins this technology can offer companies.
First, it allows the marketing department to tap into sales data, better informing their staff of a company’s customers and the market they represent. Data is increasingly becoming critical to the performance of sales activities, and should be utilized by marketing teams, tooOpens a new window .
Second, it can create additional advantages in terms of automation. Companies with under-strength, under-invested marketing teams can give them a boost if they add marketing roles to CRM platforms.
Key takeaways:
- Many US businesses fail to integrate their sales and marketing activities sufficiently, and this is being demonstrated in the way that sales CRM tech is not fully utilized to support marketing activities.
- CRM developers, like Insightly, Zoho and Microsoft Dynamics, now sell dedicated marketing modulesOpens a new window that will allow marketing teams to make more use of sales data and contacts and automate more of their core activities.
- Currently, many marketing teams are not seeing enough investment or automation and are relying on unwieldy or jury-rigged software applications.