Last week I presented a session at Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University in Atlanta. In addition to Marketing Automation, there were two big topics: Social Media and CRM. I will write about Social Media some other time, and focus on CRM in this post.
Many attendees were confused by CRM vendors claiming to offer full marketing functionality. If that’s true, why would you still need Marketing Automation? So let’s dig in and find how Marketing Automation and CRM are different.
Strong Features of CRM
In my presentation I tried to shed some light on the strong points of either system. For CRM, I focused on Salesforce.com. This was the list with strong points for a CRM system (compared to Marketing Automation):
|
|
SFDC |
MA |
|
Opportunity creation |
Yes |
No |
|
Forecasting |
Yes |
No |
|
Call logging |
Yes |
Sometimes |
|
Individual emails |
Yes |
Sometimes |
|
Products & Pricing |
Yes |
No |
|
Document library |
Yes |
Sometimes |
|
Case Management |
Yes |
No |
|
Contracts |
Yes |
No |
So in short, those are the features that individual sales people will benefit from. Marketing Automation also has some features for sales people, but those tend to be focused on lead prioritization, email, and prospect activity notifications.
Strong Features of Marketing Automation
I made a similar list for Marketing Automation:
|
|
SFDC |
MA |
|
Native Email Marketing |
No |
Yes |
|
Drip Email Marketing |
No |
Yes |
|
Automated Campaigns Flows |
No |
Yes |
|
Dynamic List Segmentation |
No |
Yes |
|
Web Analytics |
No |
Yes |
|
Deduplication |
No |
Yes |
|
Profile-based Lead Scoring |
Limited |
Yes |
|
Behavioral Lead Scoring |
No |
Yes |
|
One Type of Contact (vs Lead & Contact) |
No |
Yes |
|
Form Builder |
No |
Yes |
|
Landing Page Builder |
No |
Yes |
Today’s CRM Systems Do Not Help Marketing
My conclusion is that the typical CRM system does not have strong marketing functionality. At the same time, a CRM system is a necessity to support an efficient sales force. So your company will need both. Luckily, all Marketing Automation systems can be connected to Salesforce.com and often also to other CRM systems.
In a earlier post I wrote about an project to use Salesforce.com instead of a Marketing Automation system: the conclusion was that you need a whole range of add-ons to make it work, sort-of. In the long run, CRM systems may offer more marketing features, but today you still need a separate Marketing Automation system.
What is your take? What is the key difference between Marketing Automation and CRM?