So, your organization has just successfully completed an integration of their marketing automation system and Microsoft CRM/365. Fantastic! You now stand ready to reap the many benefits of two powerful technologies working in concert to maximize ROI. But before you and your business can fully realize all of the amazing aspects of a seamless platform integration, it’s essential to make sure all stakeholders from both the sales and marketing teams are onboard and are ready to adopt. This means having each of them prepared to understand a system that has traditionally performed two distinct functions, but one that now needs to work together as a single cohesive unit.

So what needs to happen to ensure a successful adoption of your freshly-minted, fully integrated system? Let’s take a look at some of the key factors involved in a successful adoption of an integrated platform.

Understanding the ‘whys’ of CRM and marketing automation integration

First, it’s essential for all team members to understand why an integrated CRM and automated marketing platform is so beneficial for an organization as a whole. People will only put in the effort required to learn a new system or process if they know both what they will get out of it and how it will impact the way they interact with customers and fellow employees. So as a first step, all stakeholders involved must have communicated to them some of these obvious benefits:

• Enhanced and streamlined team communication: The ability of sales and marketing team members to communicate clearly within the same toolset drives improved collaboration. For example, sales reps will be able to view and leverage messaging with a proven record of success, while marketers have access to sales data that shows which campaigns are having the greatest impact on the sales cycle. Learn more about uniting sales here.
• Better reporting and analytics: Integrating customer data, behavioral lead analysis, and predictive modeling helps better identify the areas and channels where real value can be found.
• Qualified leads: While most people understand the importance of lead scoring, it can be a struggle to identify a benchmark that aligns with sales team criteria. A fully integrated system makes it easier for marketing and sales to be on the same page when it comes to identifying “quality” leads.

Motivating your CRM users

Human nature being what it is, simply detailing the benefits of the Microsoft CRM/automated marketing platform integration may not enough to get people to use it. Some other motivations can come into play here, including:

• Accountability
• Peer pressure
• Competition
• Accountability
• Rewards

If you are someone with a vested interest in getting your team to adopt a CRM, keep the above points in mind, in addition to communicating out the benefits. Pick at least 3 of the above motivations and make a plan for how you can incorporate them into your user adoption strategy—it’s important here to communicate what your marketing team is trying to achieve with your CRM/marketing automation platform integration, so be sure your marketing team can speak to their goals clearly.

Defining roles and responsibilities

One of the best ways to ensure the planning and adoption of an integrated system is to make sure there is a good champion for the project. Ideally this will be a high-level person within the organization that can serve as the strongest evangelist for the technology. The person will not only need to be constantly preaching the benefits of adoption, but they will also need to have a firm grasp on the technology itself.

In addition, training will need to be provided as early in the process as possible and  continued on an ongoing basis as often as necessary. It helps to ensure that training includes showing how users can manage tasks simply through Microsoft CRM/365 workflows. The CRM will automatically route tasks to various groups when the planning team identifies what they want them to do.

It can also be helpful to target your KPI consumers within your organization from the outset of implementation. These team members are the ones who rely on key progress indicators the most for daily tasks and they become great cheerleaders for the integrated platform as it is rolled out. Making sure you build your CRM out with these users in mind will also help spread positive motivation towards full adoption by the entire team.

Ease of use for both systems can also facilitate greater user adoption. If you’re interested in exploring a marketing automation platform built on ease of use, contact us here to learn more about the emfluence Marketing Platform.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365