If you want to consistently grow your organization and keep up with fast-changing customer demands, alignment between sales and marketing is essential. But you already know that. You probably even make great use of your Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, including the CRM. Did you know 87% percent of sales and marketing leaders report that sales and marketing alignment is critical to business growth? What’s more, research shows that when this alignment is successful, sales generate an additional 200% in revenue from marketing tactics. With this in mind, how are you handling your marketing-sales tech stack? You may need a marketing-focused tool like Act-On to complete the picture.
Despite its many strengths, a CRM like Microsoft Dynamics often fails to provide the detailed marketing data that makes the whole picture work. However, when you integrate marketing automation with your existing CRM, you can create more personalized and meaningful experiences at all stages of the customer journey.
New Buyer Behavior Demands a New Marketing Approach
The way B2B buyers shop for new products and services has changed, and when marketing and sales are out of alignment, they can’t meet customers where they’re at in a consistent and meaningful way.
Buyers now take a digital approach to researching you and your competitors, and as a result, they spend more time under the care of marketing. This interaction starts the moment a prospect views a social post, a digital ad, or some other piece of marketing content, and it continues throughout the entire business relationship.
Moving the buyer through this journey with effective, timely content marketing and relevant engagement strategies is critical, demanding, and impossible to scale manually. However, CRM integration with marketing automation enables marketing teams to accomplish this and do so at scale.
For example, Interworkscloud, one of the world’s leading cloud services providers, struggled to fully integrate their martech stack, which prevented them from segmenting marketing lists among multiple business units and several distinct target audiences. Without the level of personalization that buyers demand, they couldn’t accurately address buyer pain points at the moment of relevance. Leveraging Act-On’s Microsoft Dynamics integration, the company increased SQL quality by 20% and email conversion rates by 20% using automated email programs with advanced segmentation.
Integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Act-On Marketing Automation Sets the Foundation for Sales Growth
Integrating your CRM with a marketing automation tool means using the power of your data to its fullest potential. By integrating what you know about a lead from their interactions with your website, emails and content offerings, you can create a sales conversation that truly matters.
Integrating Microsoft Dynamics with the Act-On allows you to:
- Build, automate, measure, and optimize lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention, and customer upselling campaigns that lead to action and advocacy through precise timing and relevance.
- Track and score accounts and leads based on behavior, and then share that data seamlessly with sales.
- Implement account-based marketing tactics allow you to coordinate more personalized lead nurturing.
- Automatically send leads to sales once they meet or exceed your lead score threshold.
- Manage, align, and recycle leads based on specific behaviors.
- Narrow in on hot prospects daily, and gain a greater understanding of why a lead was qualified and correctly assigned in the CRM.
One example of the possible results when your CRM and marketing automation platform are working together comes from an Act-On customer, Red Lion Hotels. The hospitality brand leveraged the native integration between Act-On and Microsoft Dynamics to align sales and marketing and enable targeted sales conversations. On the marketing side, the results included a 60% above-average email open rate on automated guest reservations, as well as 20 hours saved per month in manual design work on branded communications.
Quality Data Helps Identify Quality Leads
The foundation for getting better leads into your CRM and working them more efficiently is infusing marketing automation data into the sales conversation. Integrating your Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Act-On marketing automation enables you to leverage accurate data. This makes it easier to define and identify sales-ready leads.
In most cases, it’s best to look for a marketing automation tool that integrates natively with your existing CRM. With a two-way sync, supported by an official partnership between the tools, you can make more informed decisions about when and how to engage with prospects and customers across their entire journey with your business.
Connect the Dots of Engagement with CRM + Marketing Automation Integration
Act-On collects an activity history for every lead and customer, then delivers a list of Hot Prospects into Dynamics CRM based on your customized lead scoring configuration. For each prospect, your sales team will know exactly:
- The eBooks, infographics, podcasts, videos, and other content resources the lead spent time with.
- The emails they clicked on.
- The webinars they attended and how long they stayed.
- Any specific product interests, and how much time they are spending on specific website pages.
With this data in hand, salespeople can connect the dots of prospect engagement to better understand the prospect’s interests and where they’re at in the buying journey. This helps the rep avoid missing obvious topics of interest and brings them much closer to understanding pain points and making relevant connections.
For example, SimScale, the world’s first product-ready SaaS application of engineering simulation, struggled with manual tasks. The marketing team had to manually enter and follow up with all contacts following webinars. This is definitely a time-consuming process that hurt productivity and introduced the risk of manual errors at SimScale. The company leveraged Act-On’s capabilities and integrations with the Microsoft Dynamics system to automate webinars and workflows. The results included an increase of 68% for email open rates and a jump of more than 15% in MQL conversions from email onboarding.
Selecting the Right Marketing Automation Partner
Choosing the right marketing automation platform is about more than completing a checklist. Your business has processes, resources, goals, and a budget that inform your marketing automation choice. Importantly, the tool must also integrate seamlessly with your Microsoft Dynamics software while meeting your ongoing needs and challenges. A few questions to consider include:
- Does the platform have native integrations with Microsoft Dynamics CRM?
- How quickly can you move from implementation to value?
- Is the platform intuitive and easy to use?
- Does the data sync between the two systems automatically?
- Does the vendor’s onboarding program appear sufficient?
- Does the platform include account profiles that roll up all contact-level engagement data?
With these questions in mind, you can find a solution that brings marketing and sales into closer alignment and supports prospects and customers with greater understanding and personalized and relevant communications.
Raising Your Bottom Line With the Right Tech Stack
Connecting marketing automation with Microsoft Dynamics CRM creates a command center that allows you to create, manage and track campaigns across multiple channels throughout the entire lifecycle.
This connection provides intelligence that cannot be gathered in any other way, enabling marketing and sales to work together, helping them make smarter decisions with greater efficiency, and creating a company culture and activities that are centered on what matters most: the customer experience.
Interested in learning more about marketing automation and how it can help expand your Microsoft Dynamics capabilities? Connect with us today to begin your path toward better marketing processes and better results.