If your organisation uses Pipedrive or is considering it for CRM functions, you will be happy to know the platform can also transform your marketing and sales automation for the better.
Pipedrive is a deal-driven customer relationship management CRM solution popular with small to midsize businesses (SMBs). The platform is also an excellent account-management tool for marketing and the entire sales process.
As a business leader, knowing how to leverage Pipedrive to improve marketing and sales teams’ productivity is necessary. This comprehensive guide covers the most problematic areas in combining marketing automation and CRM tools and how to interlink with sales automation.
The difference between CRM software and marketing automation software
While CRM and marketing automation software may seem similar, there are several differences between them. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is used primarily in optimising sales processes, while marketing automation is concerned with marketing activities. As a result, the two serve entirely different purposes.
What is CRM software?
CRM software like Pipedrive is instrumental in contact and sales management. It allows you to monitor and carry out meaningful interactions with customers throughout the sales funnel. In addition, CRM tools provide advanced functionality and task automation. For example, it helps manage email campaigns with qualified leads and customer and deal data.
CRM tools can be used for the following:
- Tracking existing and potential customers’ activity across your customer journey touchpoints, e.g., your social media accounts, email, or website
- Gathering consumer insights
- Nurturing a relationship with each contact, e.g., assigning a salesperson to a lead that requests a consultation.
What is marketing automation software?
Marketing automation software helps streamline workflows, speed up processes, and eliminate time-wasting tasks. In addition, the software automates key marketing activities like tracking and optimising customer engagement to improve efficiency.
Marketing automation tools can be used for:
- Lead segmentation
- Lead generation
- Nurturing leads with targeted content
- Customer retention and account-based marketing.
Why do businesses need to use them together?
There is much benefit to leveraging both this software for your business. This approach mainly improves your capabilities in managing customer experience and driving growth.
CRM and marketing automation combined gives you insight into current and potential customers, which you can leverage to build stronger relationships and understand customers’ needs better.
Sales and marketing teams perform better when they can easily trade information to ensure a seamless experience for would-be customers. When a business uses both CRM and marketing tools, both teams are well informed of their leads’ expectations. As a result, they will be able to offer a personalised experience to every prospect.
Imagine how annoying it would be for a promising lead to be left unattended after showing interest in a highly marketed product. The person would lose interest. Although incidents like this are not intentional, they could often occur to the point where it taints your brand’s reputation for poor response rates. It is situations like this that combining CRM and marketing automation helps you avoid.
Interconnection between CRM software, marketing automation, and sales automation
As previously discussed, CRM automation is mainly concerned with the sales workflow. Hence CRM marketing automation brings together CRM, marketing, and sales automation under one roof. This setup simplifies many processes for marketers and salespeople as the flow of information between them is streamlined.
A combination of CRM and marketing automation platforms enables you to:
- Establish a strong relationship with leads before connecting them to a sales representative
- Keep track of the customer journey from lead generation to sale to gain insight into what needs changing and optimising
- Conduct accurate lead scoring
- Create a smooth customer journey for leads turned customers
- Gain a 360-degree view of the lead journey, including KPIs
- Establish a consistent communication strategy for lead nurturing and customer support.
Automating CRM, marketing, and sales processes improves the business’s outcomes. In addition, feedback and insights from sales and CRM will help optimise marketing efforts. And this, in turn, will help create the ideal environment for more lead conversions and return customers.
Benefits of CRMs with ready-for-use marketing automation features like Pipedrive
Fortunately, some vendors like Pipedrive have taken it upon themselves to provide an all-in-one solution with CRM marketing automation capabilities. It is why Pipedrive is a top pick for SMBs.
What are Pipedrive’s main CRM features?
Automated sales workflow
Pipedrive provides sales process automation for time-consuming, repetitive tasks. Things like sending sales emails, doing follow-ups, and updating client information will take up much of your time without boosting productivity. Pipedrive can help you create a seamless sales process through scalable automation.
Customised workflows
Every business will have its unique way of doing things. So rather than changing what works for you to suit your software, Pipedrive allows you to create a CRM workflow that meets your needs. This ensures the right people on your team have access to everything they need without workarounds.
Advanced reporting and analytics
Pipedrive allows you to track KPIs and generate custom sales reports on what matters to your team. Businesses can leverage this feature to measure performance against goals, forecast revenue, and identify opportunities to optimise the workflow.
Lead management
You can leverage the platform’s CRM capabilities to make the most out of interactions with leads. This applies to lead generation, qualification, scoring, and prioritisation.
Easy integration
Pipedrive is compatible with thousands of your favourite applications for emailing, video calls, business texting, customer support, etc. You can find the best tools to sync with your CRM solution in the Pipedrive Marketplace.
What marketing automation functionality does Pipedrive have?
Email integration
Pipedrive marketing automation improves email marketing functions. Marketers benefit from the in-built email automation, auto-reply functions, template creation, storage, etc. The best part is automation does not mean sacrificing personalisation. Your marketing email will be sent only to leads who will find it relevant according to the information provided by the CRM lead database.
Deal labels
Keeping track of every lead in your marketing funnel is more straightforward, with labels indicating where they are in your workflow. In addition, labels and automatic notifications ensure no deal stays stagnant for too long, reminding you to send follow-up messages to encourage qualified leads to move up the funnel.
Lead interactions tracking
Pipedrive provides marketers with tools to determine the lead source, actively monitor where leads are in the funnel, and pursue actions to convert the prospect. In addition, you can track each interaction, from initial contact to the final decision. The workflow design also makes it easy to share information with the sales team.
Task automation
Pipedrive marketing automation eliminates manual processes for repetitive tasks like contact management, lead scoring, and generating a deal for every new contact added. It automatically initiates appropriate actions when a lead completes one stage of the marketing cycle, e.g., moving the lead’s profile along the pipeline to the next stage. This helps you avoid overlooking leads needing attention and clogging the workflow.
What are the benefits that this ready-made functionality offers?
Better organisation
The use of labels and custom notes allows marketers to keep track of interactions with the lead at any given point. Additionally, all emails and calls initiated and scheduled via Pipedrive marketing automation are recorded onto the deal for future reference.
Streamlined processes
Everything from data collection, contact management, and sending marketing content to pushing customers up the sales funnel can be done from one platform. This means sharing information is easy, and everyone can access everything they need with a click of the button—Pipedrive streamlines inter-team communication and tracking of task progress, too.
Automated emailing
With email integration, automated emailing is easy. You can also craft email campaigns in advance and keep them within Pipedrive until it’s time to send them.
Pipedrive marketing automation use cases to consider
Pipedrive marketing automation can be used to boost your conversion rates by redirecting your efforts toward higher-quality leads. Suppose you have amassed an extensive contact database. Rather than direct your resources towards emailing contacts at random, you can create a filter that isolates contacts that have interacted with your brand in meaningful ways, thus showing interest in your offer. This helps you create an email template they will find relatable and increase your chances of converting them into customers.
You can also usher in a more personalised approach to marketing with Pipedrive’s capabilities. A CRM software helps you compile customer information, analyze user behaviour, and capture data to be presented in a reusable way. You can leverage reports on such matters to craft better marketing campaigns. Pipedrive allows you to put up feedback forms on your website that directly upload to your CRM database. You can use this to collect information on the type of leads who prefer email contact over phone calls and create more accurate target profiles to market to.
Pipedrive helps your entire team stay in sync over marketing automation and CRM tasks. You can avoid duplicated actions as it is easy to see steps taken by a team member, what is in progress, and what is pending. You can use this to avoid duplicating messages to leads, thus annoying them and skewing reporting on marketing outreach, etc.
The limitations of Pipedrive in-built features
Regardless of the many functionalities that Pipedrive’s in-built features provide, leveraging CRM automation without marketing automation software has its drawbacks.
Personalised follow-ups
Creating your first email template for a campaign is easy. However, maintaining the same level of personalisation can be tricky with auto-replies when it comes to follow-ups. Each individual might have a different take on your offer, and Pipedrive has limited features to help you prepare for such a scenario.
Automating social media engagement
Pipedrive CRM also has limited functionality for mass messaging on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
SMS automation
The Pipedrive platform does not allow you to fully automate your SMS marketing campaigns to include personalised group texts based on prior interactions with the leads.
Phone and video calls
Although Pipedrive does a good job managing contacts, it falls short in terms of communication tools. You can automate notifications to call a prospect, but you cannot automate the placement of calls or dial in directly from Pipedrive.
How to overcome these limitations
On a strategic/planning level
When it comes to personalisation, the best route is to create a custom approach that considers the client’s information. You can leverage Pipedrive’s custom fields to filter through your contacts to ensure that your auto-reply follow-up emails still resonate with the lead’s interests.
Via Workflows setup
Pipedrive might not allow you to carry out some mass communication efficiently, but you can make the most of its existing customised workflow. You can automate activities that are triggered by the action a lad takes on your website or social media to send them key marketing material before the trail goes cold. This way, less work piles up for you to sort through manually.
Via integrating apps from Pipedrive Marketplace
A valuable trick for solving the issue of features like SMS capabilities is leveraging the appropriate integrations. You can integrate SMS apps and other communication apps like Zoom to initiate such communication from within your Pipedrive. This will make it easier to make that call or send that SMS in time.
7 Tips on best Pipedrive use for sales and marketing efficiency
Get the best of both worlds by integrating your CRM and marketing automation software. Here is how it can change the way you work:
Personalise your marketing and sales messaging
Your CRM software contains details like the demographics of your leads. In the hands of a marketer, this reduces the guesswork on who to send a certain offer. Reduce the risk of wasting effort and concentrate on prospects with the highest potential. This can also improve your ROI in paid ads as you know who to target beforehand.
Run a realistic lead scoring program
Lead scoring with input from marketing automation and CRM software produces more refined results than each could individually. This makes the process faster and more efficient as it relies on more data to develop a recommendation.
Avoid duplicating effort
Duplicate data entries plague most manual marketing and sales processes, and even it can even pass down to double messaging. This gives your team more work and also annoys potential customers. With marketing automation for Pipedrive, a centralised database for your marketing and sales teams, such errors can be easily picked up and corrected. It also makes it easy to check all interaction history with a contact.
Keep track of deals won
After a deal is won, keeping up with the details during project management in a different workflow can be daunting. You can create additional stages in your sales pipeline to help you keep up with active clients. From there, it’s as simple as applying the filter “won deals” to toggle between looking at sales deals and active client deals in the same pipeline.
Leverage business SMS for marketing
In addition to email marketing, you can also invest in an SMS app integration to widen your reach. SMS is said to have an open rate of up to 98% and can improve your marketing outcomes.
Link notes/activities from Organisation to Deal, rather than Deal with Organisation
When using Pipedrive, posting to a deal will auto-populate on the affiliated organisation. It currently isn’t possible to post a generic update/note to the organisation, and it auto-populates across all the associated deals. You have to add new information about the organisation to each deal manually.
You can set up a Zapier integration that automatically copies notes in a custom field you can pin to the deals to cut down on the tedious work.
Use marketing emails as triggers
You can use marketing automation and CRM tools to turn real-time automated emails into lead generation tools by allowing users to opt-in to a demo, newsletter, etc., directly from their mailbox.
Automaly as your go-to expert for all automated processes in Pipedrive
Pipedrive marketing automation is a good move for boosting productivity. It enables you to be consistent in communicating with leads and customers and run efficient sales and marketing processes without needing outside help.
Business app integrations are a key ingredient in Pipedrive workflow automation setup for your sales & marketing teams. As there are so many factors to consider when choosing the right integrations for your business, you will want to enlist the help of automation consultants. Automaly is just what you need.
Automaly is a Pipedrive Premier Partner specialising in SMBs looking to optimise their technology stack with the best-in-class technology, automation, and software integrations. Our team is dedicated to helping clients find the quickest and most efficient way to complete tasks through Pipedrive.
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