How many sales and marketing platforms do you have? Think about it for a minute. You probably have one to manage your email campaigns. Another for your content management system. A few more for your social media management, search engine marketing and customer relationship management. Not forgetting a program to manage data synchronisation across all these applications.
Add them all up and we’re talking about six separate technology applications. At least.
According to Scott Brinker in his latest post on the MarTech 5,000, there are a massive 5,381 marketing technology solutions out there. And the 2017 MarTech Industry Council study reported that the average business has deployed 16 of them, with larger organisations using as many as 98!
But rather than making everything easy, this plethora of applications has likely ended up making your tasks more complicated, cumbersome and time-consuming.
Take a typical daily task:
Say you have all your customers’ details in Salesforce, your email marketing is run through MailChimp, and you use Hootsuite to manage your social media marketing.
Now, imagine you want to call a prospect. You start with Salesforce to see what stage of the lifecycle they are currently in. Next, you look at MailChimp to check if they engaged with your latest email campaign. Then, go into Hootsuite to see whether they have engaged with your brand on social.
Not only is this whole process extremely inefficient, it also doesn’t give you the whole picture. Sure, each individual application promises to talk to other applications, but because you cannot see all the data you need in one place, you are likely to miss key parts of the story.
The fact is, there’s no real single customer view.
We believe it’s time to stop working in silos and look to one operating system that ties all the sales and marketing processes together.
Think about the time you’ll save by having one place to log in and manage every aspect of your sales and marketing. You can see all your email marketing campaigns, social media engagements, landing page visits, and call centre interactions in one place. The latest technology, Zoho Flow, even lets you automate business workflows by connecting your apps. So, you can accomplish routine tasks that usually eat into your productive work time
The result? You are more efficient, your team is more efficient, and your customers are more engaged.
Know your customers from every angle
If you’re going to truly understand your customers, you need to know how individual customers interact with your brand, across all channels. But with data in silos, piecing it together in a way that gives you actionable insights is nearly impossible. With one CRM system that integrates social media, email, web, call centre, sales and more, you can paint a clear picture of what’s happening with your customers – in real-time. For example, Zoho CRM allows you to connect any data source to create your own dashboard with the information you want to see.
The bottom line
When it comes down to budgets (and let’s face it – it always comes down to budgets), swapping multiple application subscriptions for one all-powerful solution is a no-brainer. Especially when the one you choose offers an exceptional ROI.
Not everyone in a company will use all the applications in Zoho CRM, for example, but that’s not the point. There are enough applications you will be using frequently and the price per month is low enough that it justifies paying for the whole package, rather than subscribing separately to every individual app you need.
Summary
Sales and marketing is a different world than it was just a few years ago, and the old-school siloed approach no longer cuts it. By tapping into an all-in-one CRM, you can deliver the ultimate triple play of reduced cost, higher customer engagement, and more sales – all while avoiding the headache of managing multiple platforms. This is something every business should be looking at now. There are already companies out there reaping the benefits of an all-in-one CRM. Why shouldn’t this be you?
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As a partner of Zoho, Informatix has all the tools you need to unleash the power of your CRM and achieve the extraordinary. Get your free trial of Zoho CRM today!