When most people think about CRM, they think in terms of sales. But while sales are the function that tends to drive most CRM implementations, the marketing department should not be overlooked. CRM can realize enhanced lead quality, increased efficiency, stronger customer relationships, enhanced communication, lower costs, and increased customer content. Here’s why marketers need to make sure they’re a key part of the conversation about implementing CRM.

1. It strengthens the relationship with sales professionals

Salespeople who are confident in the leads they receive from marketing tend to follow those leads quickly. For most organizations, around a day is the ideal. Thus, simply managing the leads from marketing to sales through the process gives the sales team confidence in the leads, meaning they are followed up more quickly and are therefore more likely to convert.

It makes it possible for marketers and salespeople to easily see the sales pipeline, allocate tasks between departments, and effectively manage marketing and sales campaigns. CRM Software can underpin sales and marketing alignment.

2. It lets you profile customers based on the value

Successful marketing depends on the customer’s understanding. With insight from your database, CRM enables you to extract meaning and apply your marketing; explicit customer information that helps you connect with the purpose and effect of the marketing dots.

By looking at groups of clients in terms of the revenue they generate and the costs of establishing and maintaining relationships with them, CRM enables you to do value-based segmentation.

3. It integrates and improves your email marketing with

Relevant emails drive, as per research, 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. Little wonder CRM-driven email marketing is such a popular tool among marketers, with 89 percent saying that email was their primary lead generation channel.

CRM allows you to deliver the correct message to the right person at the right time , which leads to higher investment returns.

4. It lets you automate some of your marketing

Automation through CRM Software makes your marketing far more efficient and effective. Automatic code generation that captures online data, automatically inputs it into your CRM, for example, and assigns leads according to workflow rules, reduces the scope for errors, and optimizes for optimal results, marketing, and sales resources.

5. It allows you to track performance

As new customers are acquired, it automatically monitors campaign metrics, customer attrition rates, cross-sell rates, up-sell rates, and an average number of transactions. This occurs in short cycles of self-education, driving up the ROI of your campaigns. By pressing a button, you can pull up reports or create ongoing dashboards, where you can monitor the progress of your leads in the sales cycle and see how pipeline and revenue are affected by marketing in real-time. This enables you to repeat successful initiatives, stop using unproductive lead sources to waste resources, and create a virtuous feedback loop.

CRM Sales? Obviously. But real-world, real-time data that will load and boost your future sales is surely a reason enough for marketers to make CRM a priority for the deep and actionable insights your CRM provides.