Leading Topic: Technology
Classification: IPTC: 13000000 • IAB-QAG: IAB19-18, IAB19
Please enjoy this #tech content, How To Align Your ABM, Marketing Automation And CRM Systems To Measure Campaign ROI, below.
Salesforce CRM marketing champion leading the practice for EigenX, specializing in manufacturing, higher education and financial services.
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As a marketer looking to get ready for the spring campaigns with your marketing team, one of the challenges is aligning your customer relationship marketing (CRM), marketing automation and account-based marketing (ABM) tools so that they can start measuring the campaign ROI. Marketing teams run the segmentation for their accounts from the CRM system and leverage the ABM system firmographics data to segment further on the ABM campaigns. Most of the touchpoints for the key contacts on the accounts happen in the CRM and marketing automation systems in the form of emails and mobile messages.
The challenge is how to report on the effectiveness of the campaigns when these three systems are involved with ad-hoc integration between them. Here, I will provide you with guidelines on what you can do strategically as a marketer that can help get your reports easily and with fewer errors.
Define Your System Of Records
The core data for the campaigns are accounts, contacts and campaigns. The key questions to ask are:
1. Which of the three systems involved would have the most updated information on accounts and contacts?
2. Which system has the key contacts for your accounts, and where does your team keep your contacts updated?
Ideally, the CRM system should be the system of record for accounts and contacts. If the marketing team wants to do segmentation for the accounts based on further firmographics like company size, industry and employee count, the segmentation data can be on the ABM system. This can help marketers easily segment their favorite ABM and execute their ABM campaigns. Any channel engagement data like email clicks through and opens can reside in your marketing automation system.
Reporting In One System
Once your system of records is defined, integration between the systems is important to ensure that all of the relevant data flows between systems in real time. Since the engagements for your contacts can happen in CRM in the form of phone calls from sales reps and emails from your marketing automation, the question comes down to which system can be the right system for running your campaign performance reports.
Traditionally, marketers would want to keep the reporting on the ABM system, as the entirety of ABM campaigns is executed in that system. However, due to the limited integration of ABM systems within CRM systems like Salesforce and marketing automation systems, it might make more sense to keep the reporting at the CRM level. How do you ensure that CRM has all of the reporting data needed?
1. Any campaigns created in ABM systems should be synced to a campaign in your CRM system.
2. Any journeys or campaigns run in your marketing automation system should also be synced to your CRM system as campaigns.
3. All outbound calls made by the sales reps for the ABM campaign need to be logged in the CRM campaign or a child of the ABM campaign in your CRM.
4. Leveraging the native integration capabilities of your CRM with ABM and marketing automation or doing a batch data dump to your CRM can ensure that the CRM system is fully updated with all of the reporting data.
5. Any opportunities created from the campaign should be tagged with the ABM campaign, which can be used to measure campaign ROI easily.
6. Leveraging CRM for reporting can also help marketing teams proactively notify the sales team of any successful engagements immediately. This would align the sales and marketing teams on the ABM campaigns and ensure the success of the campaign.
Instead of having a narrow-minded approach to using ABM tools for everything, marketers should look into using CRM for the reporting of their campaigns and keep the campaign data in one place. As your marketing team drives the ABM campaigns in your ABM tools, it is important for the sales, IT and marketing teams to align on the system of records and reporting and ensure that all of them are done in one system.
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