CRM vs. Marketing Automation

Tough question! As a marketer (and yes, I am biased), I would select marketing automation over a CRM tool and here's why -- most solid MA platforms give you the ability to perform at least rudimentary CRM using their systems while the converse (most CRM tools give you basic MA) is not true.

Using MA, you can also score leads based on their actions and set alerts to determine a certain threshold of qualification. If sales is qualifying and managing the leads in a CRM tool, it becomes very subjective as to when leads are escalated to 'sales-ready'...and many leads seem to languish in limbo (between a lead and opportunity) for years and years.

MA makes it easier to keep the lead database active although you'd certainly miss the ability to keep detailed notes, pull specialized reports, etc that you could get from your CRM tool.

I would fight until I could get both. CRM is primarily for sales and service and MA is primarliy for marketing (using a broad brush). The integration between the 2 bridges the gap. MA systems were not designed to be customer service and sales databases, and CRM systems were not designed to run complex marketing campaigns. Anyone making you choose needs some convincing.

Justin is spot on. Both are needed! We often see the need for one or the other from a single, biased perspective: functional and organizational. It is when we take an enterprise view over a series of short, mid and longer time horizons the need for both becomes clear as do some significant gaps in present offerings.

Both CRM and MA are functionally focused and support managing initiatives, projects and engagements for their respective target organizations (e.g., their target market). Unfortunately, a gap exists with current offerings in terms of support for strategically managing the entire market and customer life cycle as a unified effort. The gap and need become very clear when developing and implementing a marketing strategy where both organization must work and be managed in concert to achieve a strategic goal over longer term horizons. Thus, we need both MA, CRM and a holistic overlay to ensure activities in both organizations are aligned and working in concert to achieve the objectives associated with corporate strategy.

Picking up the "as a marketer" condition stated in your question, I'd naturally be inclined to pick the MA system if forced to choose. The capabilities of these systems allow you to manage quantity and quality of leads and optimize content, lead sources, and campaigns. Most MA platforms are better suited than most CRM systems to help marketers ply their trade.

But thinking about the overall business first, I think CRM has to take priority. Yes there are some basic CRM capabilities in some marketing automation platforms, and many marketers are painfully aware of the lack of marketing-friendly features in many CRM system. But the sales team needs to be supported first, and should have a full featured CRM system that can be tailored to their requirements. Best to solve that problem first, then build the case for marketing to add value through automation and related services.

While I am a marketer by training, I have switched over to the database side over the course of the past 6-7 years. So I kind of ride the fence to both sides.

When I put on my database hat, I see CRM as a system that can help you not only manage sales, but actually run the business - especially when properly integrated with other back-office systems. Some CRM systems have marketing campaign, email marketing and some even go as far as including drip marketing components.

But I do understand the need to have a full marketing automation system to enhance the efforts of the marketing department, and most CRM systems don't go far enough to support the full needs yet.

If you can marry both systems and integrate them seamlessly, you can have the best of both worlds and make both sales, marketing and even other departments VERY happy!

Good post from Eloqua marketer Adam Needles on this topic at http://www.silverpop.com/blogs/demand-generation/marketing-automation/whats-t.... His perspective is you need both and that's right from an overall organizational perspective.

I think the bottom line is you need both, because each fulfills a vital part of managing sales cycles.

For moving prospects through the upper sales funnel and turning them into new buyers, MA is indispensable. Yet when they become customers, transforming transactions into a true customer relationship requires CRM. Staying in step with customers as they change their preferences and understanding how their needs change also makes CRM critical.

In defining the importance of MA and CRM I think it’s critical to start first with the goals and strategies of a company. MA is certainly powerful for attracting customers and moving them through a upper funnel of a sales cycle. As nearly all MA applications are Web-based, there are plenty of metrics to measure performance. Likewise, CRM can measure the relationship longevity and purchases, the history of successful up-sell and cross-sell strategies as well.

As all of the technologies supporting MA and CRM are entirely digital there is no shortage of measures of performance or metrics. Making those metrics matter, making them a true measure of what is relevant to customers, requires a very synchronized, well thought-out marketing strategy that takes only the best of what MA and CRM has to offer for a given set of goals.

Thanks, Elizabeth! I like your point about the subjectivity of CRM systems. Definitely a valid consideration in comparison with a lead scoring model based on prospect profiles and behavior.

I agree with Elizabeth. Isn't MA really a component of CRM? I would submit that MA is really a process, whereas CRM leans more towards an application. (Granted, as the latter has become somewhat of a sacrifical buzzword, there is no clear definition we can all agree on). CRM in it's true form, is the bucket and MA is the mechanism to get the contents out of the bucket.

I must reply that both are necessary for success.

While CRM databases are designed to allow an organization to do three core things:
OPTIMIZING HUMAN SYSTEMS
*Sales teams to input, manage and track their leads that are generated by their marketing team
*Customer service teams to input, manage and track customer service and support quieries
* Marketing teams to segment customer/sales data e.g. which customers bought an iPhone in the last 6 months.

A marketing automation database is a SEPERATE database, designed to allow an organization to do 7 core things:
MAXIMIZING SYSTEM PROCESSES
*Lead Generation
*Lead Nurturing
*Lead Scoring
*Website tracking
*Email Marketing
*Optimizing Landing Pages
*Marketing Assessment Management

For transactional marketing with low repeat purchase or LTV opportunity, many marketing automation packages give you enough CRM and plenty of cost reducing automation to make great sense as your first move, however as products grow in complexity and sales capability becomes an essential element of business success (as in big ticket consumer and much of B2B, then ...
1) CRM is the core application that exists to measure and diagnose issues directly related to revenue and near term pipeline health related to sales performance. If you are hugely sales led, you may be able to get by with very little automation -- i.e. the automation available out of the box from SFDC.
2) If your sales activity is humming, then it might make sense to build up marketing capabilities to increase funnel throughput, and it make sense to add marketing automation to be able to scale an implement iterative improvement at dramatically lower operational cost.

Well that all depends on the value of the products being sold. If we are dealing with a low value commodity then it would be marketing automation. However if we are dealing with High Value solutions then CRM. However if we are in the business of providing services with the view of forming long term relationships then their would be a good case for both marketing automation for lead generation and CRM for lead tracking and development.

Regards
Steve.

As a marketer, I would have to choose a marketing automation system over a pure play CRM solution. As a marketer, my main focus is in campaign management i.e. direct mail, email, social, call center, web and offline (kiosks). There are several campaigns that we run manually and the promise of marketing automation allows me to "set it and forget it" those campaigns that are routine which frees me and my staff to focus on other things that require our attention.

For us, we are not at a level of marketing or CRM maturity, to go for an integrated CRM solution that contains marketing automation. But as a marketer and CRM person, I definitely endorse both but as a marketer, MA would be the way to go for me.

As a CRM consultant, (GoldMine) and a marketer (IntelliClick), I will second Kendra's comment that CRM integrated eMarketing is the way to go. What ever hat you wear, these days sales and marketing functions must seamlessly go together!

I can't see marketing automation and CRM as two separable entities. I believe that marketing automation should be integrated into your overall CRM strategy.

This is particularly true when it comes to social media marketing. To make the most out of CRM and SMM automation, the golden rule is to automate everything that does NOT violate the "humanness" of social media.

Because time is money, you should automate certain processes but make sure they are the "RIGHT" ones.
For example, prescheduling your tweets and social updates is a time-saving practice that has no negative side effects.
However, sending automatic private messages to new Twitter followers is a big "NO!" since people know it's automatic!
For more details, on the best SMM automation and social CRM practices, I recommend the following articles:

http://garious.com/blog/2011/06/when-is-social-media-marketing-automation-coo...

http://garious.com/blog/2011/05/attention-social-media-marketers-learn-how-to...

I hope my awnser provided new insights. To our success!

While Elizabeths answer is well thought out and can be true depending on the tools being used; I have found that a more integrated CRM tool is the way to go. Salesforce.com is such a tool. I also think CRM is the way to go because if you cannot successfully manage your customers, potential or not, then you cannot effectively market to them.

I am disturbed by the number of people who have fallen for the Salesforce line that MA is just a subset of CRM.

Marketing Automation is a much more powerful animal altogether - more like Business Intelligence for Marketing. That's why CRM vendors are trying to kill it.

A second generation Marketing Automation package can tell you in real time who is on your website, even if they haven't registered with you. It will tell you whether they came in from search, link from another site or social media - even drilling down to which search term was used or which thread in LinkedIn. It can show you exactly what they are interested in, with pages visited links used (or even hovered over) and how long they spent. It can even amalgamate this over time so you know that 5 people from one company visited your website over the past week, they spent 1 hour in total, they downloaded two white papers and they showed interest in Products A and C but not B.

That gives you a head start in nurturing. You can then see in real time just how that nurturing process is going and set expected next step timings with alternative strategies for slower or faster buyers. You can offer alternatives - seminar v white paper, and ensure that whichever is chosen, the other stage is not forgotten. You can segment closely according to company behaviour, individual behaviour - even look up their interests on LinkedIn and send them stuff relevant to that. You can widen the net, by automatically contacting other people you expect to be involved in the decision when it reaches a certain stage. You can monitor it and choose exactly the right moment to engage directly.

It can also be extremely powerful in leveraging information. If your Marketing Automation package covers all of your interest generation methods then you can identify where all of your interest comes from - which campaigns did the work. You can thus compare email against social media and against SEO in generating traffic.

It gets even more powerful if there is a link with CRM and your accounting package. You can then track all interest right through to sale and see what proportion of the interest generated by each campaign turned into sales at the end - even how long they took. That means you can evaluate your nurturing programme - is this piece of collateral converting more than that one or is this multi-stage email more effective than that one?

Finally you can put figures to the whole process. If you have 10,000 people at the top and 100 at the bottom, spending £1,000 each you can calculate the value of those 10,000 - and you can do the same at all the levels you set in between. You can predict that if you have 10,000 at the top that will turn into X sales in 3 months and Y sales in 6. You can even predict demand and set inventory etc. accordingly.

I bet you can't do that with your CRM!

I am with Eloqua, the market leader in the marketing automation space. I've been with the company for eight years and spent two years at Salesforce.com prior to joining Eloqua. I'd like to share what one Eloqua client shared with me:

Business challenge Eloqua will address.
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We believe that demand generation has four parts - lead generation, lead qualification, lead nurturing and lead analysis. While Salesfore.com can help us with lead generation, it doesn't have the necessary functionality to automate lead qualification and lead nurturing or the sophistication to help us with lead analysis. Eloqua addresses the automation and analytics pieces of the puzzle. With automation and measurement we will be more accountable for our marketing program decisions and we will make smarter decisions based on the metrics.

Specifically:

• Lead scoring
• Web forms and analytics
• Tracking Digital Body Language
• Data Management
• Email and webinar programs
• Search engine marketing
• Lead nurturing campaigns
• Automation, automation, automation
• Smarter marketing

Why you selected Eloqua?

Salesforce.com is an amazing solution and does a great job with sales' needs. But it's limited in demand generation functionality, specifically the idea of "touch" or "drip" marketing. Basically, Salesfore.com is to sales as what Eloqua is to marketing. After hearing from Eloqua customers and seeing the demonstration it became immediately clear just how much we needed Eloqua. And to be honest, no other Salesforce.com partner solution compares. They may think they compete, but Eloqua is in a league of its own.

Jill Rowley, Marketing Automation & Demand Generation Specialist
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jillbrewbakerrowley