Monthly Archives: November 2009

How Are CRM and Marketing Automation Different?

Last week I presented a session at Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University in Atlanta. In addition to Marketing Automation, there were two big topics: Social Media and CRM. I will write about Social Media some other time, and focus on CRM in this post.

Many attendees were confused by CRM vendors claiming to offer full marketing functionality. If that’s true, why would you still need Marketing Automation? So let’s dig in and find how Marketing Automation and CRM are different.

Strong Features of CRM

In my presentation I tried to shed some light on the strong points of either system. For CRM, I focused on Salesforce.com. This was the list with strong points for a CRM system (compared to Marketing Automation):

SFDC

MA

Opportunity creation

Yes

No

Forecasting

Yes

No

Call logging

Yes

Sometimes

Individual emails

Yes

Sometimes

Products & Pricing

Yes

No

Document library

Yes

Sometimes

Case Management

Yes

No

Contracts

Yes

No

So in short, those are the features that individual sales people will benefit from. Marketing Automation also has some features for sales people, but those tend to be focused on lead prioritization, email, and prospect activity notifications.

Strong Features of Marketing Automation

I made a similar list for Marketing Automation:

SFDC

MA

Native Email Marketing

No

Yes

Drip Email Marketing

No

Yes

Automated Campaigns Flows

No

Yes

Dynamic List Segmentation

No

Yes

Web Analytics

No

Yes

Deduplication

No

Yes

Profile-based Lead Scoring

Limited

Yes

Behavioral Lead Scoring

No

Yes

One Type of Contact (vs Lead & Contact)

No

Yes

Form Builder

No

Yes

Landing Page Builder

No

Yes

Today’s CRM Systems Do Not Help Marketing

My conclusion is that the typical CRM system does not have strong marketing functionality. At the same time, a CRM system is a necessity to support an efficient sales force. So your company will need both. Luckily, all Marketing Automation systems can be connected to Salesforce.com and often also to other CRM systems.

In a earlier post I wrote about an project to use Salesforce.com instead of a Marketing Automation system: the conclusion was that you need a whole range of add-ons to make it work, sort-of. In the long run, CRM systems may offer more marketing features, but today you still need a separate Marketing Automation system.

What is your take? What is the key difference between Marketing Automation and CRM?