As marketers (and particularly as those who skew towards the creative end of the spectrum), we’re perpetually fascinated by the psychology behind what we do: what motivates our audience, what grabs their interest, and how we can better reach them. But there are times in our jobs when we need to stop philosophizing and theorizing and take a more tactical, hands-on approach — and integrating your CRM with your marketing automation platform is one of those times.
Kathryn Honderd, Pardot’s Client Services Manager (and a strong advocate of to-do lists and tactical approaches), gave a webinar on this topic recently and shared her expertise from helping hundreds of clients with CRM integrations. Her advice? Define your goals, map out a plan, and know what to expect from your integration before you even get started. Let’s take a closer look.
Communicate with your sales team.
Integrating your marketing automation system and and your CRM is all about sales and marketing alignment, so make sure your sales team has input from the very start. Your sales reps may be very comfortable with your CRM and may not see a need for introducing a new system, so make sure they understand the benefits of marketing automation and the goals you hope to achieve by implementing it. And, as Kathryn points out, it often helps to pull one sales rep in on the implementation process, thoroughly train them and allow them to see results, then let that sales rep sell the rest of the team on marketing automation.
Communicate with your vendor.
Chances are, your vendor deals with integrations like yours every day, and they have a wealth of knowledge to share with you on how to best configure the integration to meet your goals. Talk to your vendor about your goals for the integration, and make sure you can answer all of the questions on the checklist below before you get started (even if you don’t fill in the answers!).
Want to learn more about the next steps for getting for optimizing your CRM integration? Join us for Kathryn’s free follow-up webinar this Thursday, “Marketing Automation and CRM: Terrible Twosome or Dynamic Duo?” And, as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts in our comments section!