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Top 5 Benefits of Integrating QuickBooks and Dynamics 365 CRM with InoLink
Most of you would be well acquainted with our popular integration app – – which is also a . To know what made InoLink so popular, let’s delve deep and see why our Dynamics 365 CRM friends prefer it over others.
So, why InoLink?
InoLink, a cloud-based productivity app for Dynamics 365 CRM provides seamless integration between Dynamics 365 CRM and Intuit QuickBooks. Being a bi-directional integration app, by using InoLink you will get the following benefits:
Sync QuickBooks and Dynamics 365 CRM data
You can easily link the existing Accounts/Contacts/Products/Prices in Dynamics 365 CRM and QuickBooks by using InoLink. With this two-way sync of Accounts, Contacts, Products and Prices, you will experience a better and secure flow of information between Dynamics 365 CRM and QuickBooks.
Sync single instance of Dynamics 365 CRM with multiple QuickBooks Companies
InoLink will enable you to sync one or more QuickBooks Company with a single instance of Dynamics 365 CRM. This will in return help you to maintain and manage accounting data with ease since there is no necessity to create a new instance of Dynamics 365 CRM for every new QuickBooks Company.
Process data Real-time
Using InoLink, you can now easily process data in real-time from Dynamics 365 CRM to QuickBooks. Any changes or updates made by you in Dynamics 365 CRM will be automatically reflected in QuickBooks. You will now no longer have to make manual entries and improving the efficiency of the processes or tasks assigned to you.
Hosted on Azure platform
With InoLink being a cloud-based solution, you can easily sync services hosted on the Azure platform with Dynamics 365 CRM in a more effective and diverse manner. It will also help to reduce the cost required to manage and maintain the IT system and there will be no more dependency on Windows application. All in all, it is a viable and profitable option for any business organization.
Data Integrity
By linking existing Accounts/Contacts/Products in Dynamics 365 CRM and QuickBooks, you can easily avoid duplication of data. With its real-time processing of data, InoLink ensures that the data fed in Dynamics 365 CRM is replicated in QuickBooks. This will help you to maintain the integrity of data and avoid double entry.
So as you can see, all these amazing features have made InoLink quite popular and user friendly among our Dynamics 365 CRM friends.
If you are curious to know more about this wonderful integration app, then wait no more!
Just go to our or and download this exclusive app for a trial period of 15 days.
For any more information or a personal demo, reach us at crm@inogic.com
Until then – Stay Safe, Stay Healthy!
Project Manager Benefits – 5 Things
Save Thousands of Dollars by Bringing on a Project Manager
Some may say paying to have a Project Manager is too costly, but I will be discussing 5 benefits of having a Project Manager to help manage your further project and how the benefits outweigh the cost.
5 Advantages of a Project Manager
Know What You Are Paying For and Save Thousands
Down below are some benefits that Project manager brings to a project:
1) Scheduling: our project managers have access to their entire teams’ schedules and can coordinate and schedule meetings as needed. By having this to coordinate with multiple parties it saves lots of time. When trying to coordinate with multiple parties, days or weeks can go by before a time is locked in. For you having to be the scheduler for meetings, the project manager can split that time in half.
2) Budget: amongst many of project managers main jobs is to monitor and hold the project team to stay within the budget for that specific project. With having to deal with project architects and developers, as much as they try to stay under budget, more often than not they go over budget because it’s not their main job to worry about the budget but to do their jobs. Having a Project Manager to help monitor that budget will help your team prioritize and maximize their time so they don’t waste time. On projects without a project manager, teams often find going over budget as they don’t monitor the hours because of times spent on tasks.
3) Scope: one of many other key aspects to a project managers job is to monitor and manage the scope of the project. While working on projects it can be super easy to fall into a process where developers and other leads allow scope creep and modifications to the project that are outside of the scope. This leads to an additional budget that was not expected, and timelines that are longer than anticipated. The project manager can help make sure that scope creep will not affect major deadlines and priorities.
4) Risks & Issues: a major reason many like to have a project manager on their projects is to help deal with any potential risks and or issues that could come up. Having someone or something that can assess those risks, what they may do or cost to the project and help identify the best way to assess those risks is a key factor to project success. A project manager helps manage those risks so they don’t affect your deadlines. Many times these risks postpone deadlines because there isn’t one resource dedicated to tackling these obstacles.
5) Efficiency & Direction: project managers directly work with the project team to assess tasks, and ensure that those tasks are taking the project down the right road. Most times without a project manager, tasks are identified too early or aren’t relevant for the immediate needs of the project. With project managers this efficiency can be avoided.
As you can see all 5 of these key points are beneficial to having a project manager. More often than not the time project manager cost is added into a quote and contract so you know what you are paying for. Although having to pay for a project manager is another cost for a project, you will save thousands of dollars by bringing on a project manager to help use your time and budget efficiently.
As a Microsoft US Partner of the Year and Inc. Magazine’s Best Places to Work winner, JourneyTEAM helps your organization with the right guidance and technologies for you.
Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636
JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more.
The Benefits of Doing Machine Learning and Analytics in the Cloud
Reading Time: 4 mins 30 sec.
Analytics with data science has been one of the last enterprise systems to move to the cloud, but the situation has changed fundamentally in just the last year or two.
Suddenly, there is a proliferation of cloud-based databases and open-source machine learning development frameworks like SageMaker and TensorFlow—all of them now being heavily promoted by the major cloud vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and more).
The cloud is quickly becoming everyone’s preferred way of doing machine learning and analytics. If you know your way around all the available components, it can be easy to build even the most sophisticated machine learning models for everything from image recognition to fraud detection in the cloud.
What to use—when and how
There’s a ton of rich functionality available in the cloud that you can spin up right now. Over the last few years, there’s been a real shift from heavyweight on-premises installations of data science and predictive analytics to the more lightweight approach that the cloud offers.
The breadth of capabilities that the cloud providers have created combined with the ease of use of a data science platform like TIBCO’s, organizations can spin up environments very quickly without a great deal of IT overhead. This combination of scalability and flexibility is the central value of the cloud when it comes to doing analytics. In fact, with TIBCO® Data Science, you can create solutions across all of these various cloud environments without needing to learn the nuances of each.
Here’s a helpful chart of the technologies available for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the cloud:
Proof it’s as easy as it sounds
It really is that easy. The proof is in our customers’ success stories. Below are a couple of case studies that show how easy it can be to build applications based on sophisticated AI and machine learning, using the cloud.
- Tipping Point Community fights poverty with data:
As a non-profit organization looking to better understand the drivers behind poverty, Tipping Point started a project to explore correlations between parking citations, late fees, and low-income individuals. Using TIBCO Data Science’s collaborative interface for business users and deploying machine learning models in the cloud to discover insights, Tipping Point found a disproportionate impact on low-income drivers. We’re proud to say these data-driven recommendations that Tipping Point made to the San Francisco Office of Financial Justice led to a change in policy to make the system fairer.
- Leidos unlocks big data potential for healthcare analytics:
Leidos partnered with TIBCO Data Science, an enterprise-class cloud platform that leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS), to allow users to create machine learning workflows. By using the cloud, Leidos opened up collaboration across teams and was able to perform quicker analyses. It was able to analyze healthcare data to determine the cause of disease outbreaks like HIV and Zika, consolidate data around emerging healthcare policies, and explore human factors affecting space exploration for NASA.
Across these and many other examples, performing analytics and machine learning in the cloud gives organizations the ability to uncover hidden patterns, anticipate outcomes, and react quickly to real-world events. Data science teams can spin up new systems in the cloud in a matter of hours, performing advanced analytics in a low-code, visual data science environment like TIBCO’s to find the answers to their toughest problems, fast.
Connect teams & scale algorithms with cloud-enabled tech
The TIBCO Data Science platform provides an interactive interface for teams to collaborate on projects in the cloud. Teams scattered around the globe, across different departments, in different roles, can connect through the web-based interface to solve difficult data science problems together. Furthermore, the algorithms TIBCO provides through a simple drag and drop interface are not only easy to use, without requiring a lot of code, but they’re also readily scalable and immensely powerful. But if coding is your thing, you can also use the embedded Jupyter Notebooks that are built into the platform.
Watch this webinar for more on available cloud technologies and the many benefits of doing machine learning and analytics in the cloud.
Get started right now. Go to the AWS marketplace and sign up for a preview of the TIBCO Data Science platform, connect to open sources of data, and start building machine learning models today.
TESCO Bank and PostNL Discuss Their Journey to the Cloud: The Pitfalls, Challenges, and Benefits
At TIBCO NOW London, TIBCO’s Darren Crowder, Head of Solution Consulting in UKI & Netherlands, interviewed Ian Skelly, Head of Software Engineering at TESCO Bank, and Jasper ten Hove, the Logistical e-commerce IT Manager of PostNL, to learn first-hand how they embarked on their cloud transformation journey. He wanted to see how they optimize technology and resources to drive innovation in their respective industries, and how they deployed mission-critical business applications and services in the cloud.
What was the compelling event that made your organization move to the cloud?
Ian Skelly (TESCO): Our main motivation was to address currency risk attached to our aging on-premises data center and the need to fix this. This drove us into the fast lane to address our challenges and a clear strategic path to the cloud. Moving to the cloud has decreased the number of handoffs between people, thus increasing security, and it’s allowed us to change customer offerings. We are at a point today where all of our customer-facing channels are in the cloud.
Jasper ten Hove (PostNL): The reason we looked at cloud infrastructure is that there was an interesting dynamic in the organization. The letter side of the business needed to save costs while the parcel side of the business needed to grow and have more capacity. Quite early on we thought cloud could be the answer for both. We started moving to the cloud to be faster in delivering changes and to also be more cost effective. As a result, we’ve decreased infrastructure costs by 40% and we get things to market much faster now.
Is operating in the cloud really cheaper than operating in the data center?
Ian: You don’t see the cost savings right away. But it gives you the ability to cost optimize in the future. Operating in the cloud space, you are closer to what things cost and their ROI. For certain products, it’s easier to measure that investment and decide what’s worth it or not and you can just shut it down if it isn’t working because you haven’t put in that upfront investment.
Jasper: For us, total spend stayed the same but we now have less money going into data centers and more money going into product development.
What are some of the pitfalls you experienced in your journey into the cloud? What would you try to avoid as you go forward or if you had a second chance?
Ian: Spend your money on consultancy, but don’t get them to do things for you – get them to coach and mentor you and teach you how to do things yourself. In the cloud, operations people, management, and maybe infrastructure need to go on a journey with you. That’s a really big part of your success. You maybe need to engage training partners to help and make sure everyone is trained in the capabilities of the cloud.
Jasper: You need to be clear and understand why you are going to the cloud. Going to the cloud is not a goal in itself. In the beginning, we had some apps we were going to lift and shift, but we realized that that doesn’t really make sense. You lose most of the benefits of the cloud if you don’t rethink an application and really step into the benefits.
In terms of using TIBCO tech in the cloud, what things have been major benefits for you?
Ian: It makes resilience easier. You can deal with practical things in the cloud-like public events. For instance, when we advertised TESCO’s new credit card rate, we got 200,000 hits and we could deal with that in the cloud because you can scale and meet those demands wherein traditional ways, we would have had problems.
Jasper: We mostly use TIBCO BusinessWorks™ 5 and we are now in the process of moving to TIBCO BusinessWorks™ Container Edition. TIBCO is the first product to actually deliver 100% uptime on our systems and that’s why we are sticking with it.
To get help on your journey to the cloud, download this whitepaper, TIBCO Cloud Path: Smart and Complete Cloud Migration Assessment, Preparation, and Execution, watch our webinar series Choose Your Path > Journey to Cloud or contact us for help.
What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
The Benefits of Marketing Automation
In a nutshell, marketing automation helps marketers conserve resources while also launching more campaigns more effectively. But the delight is in the details, so let’s take a closer look at how marketers can reap all the benefits of a powerful, practical marketing automation solution.
More Efficient and Effective Marketing Campaigns
In the modern marketing world, successful campaigns rely on highly targeted marketing, which basically boils down to the old adage of delivering the right message to the right person or business at the right time. Prior to marketing automation, there was a lot of guesswork involved, as marketers were forced to take a trial-and-error approach to their campaigns. This resulted in constant random acts of marketing with no way of knowing what was effective and what was not.
With marketing automation, however, marketers can now more easily identify their web visitors, allowing them to turn unknown prospects into known leads. And once they know who they’re marketing to, they can segment these leads by behaviors, demographics, and other characteristics to create customized and automated lead nurturing campaigns. This way, marketers can stay top-of-mind with their consumers as they guide them along the customer journey with highly personalized messaging (more on this below).
The best part is that, as your potential customers interact with your brand online, you can track all of their engagements and pass that information along to your sales team through a CRM system integration. This allows for better sales and marketing alignment and collaboration, more streamlined lead scoring and handoffs, and excellent insight into the customer journey from start to finish.
Conserve Resources and Be More Creative
In broad terms, marketing automation software helps users save time, money, and headcount. And in doing so, marketers are able to focus their efforts where they matter most, which is developing more creative and compelling content and campaigns. When your whole day isn’t spent on busy work just to keep the lights on, innovative marketers are able to use their imagination to go beyond traditional methods and stale concepts.
Whereas marketers used to have to develop new campaigns from scratch, which is neither efficient nor effective, they can now leverage marketing automation to replicate and refine processes, templates, branding initiatives — you name it, really. So, as long as your target audiences are locked down and you know exactly how you want to message your prospects and customers, you can use your existing assets to deliver consistent marketing assets and campaigns while using personalized messages for each audience segment.
Further, since marketing automation allows for streamlined and repeatable processes and assets, marketing departments spend less time constantly re-building materials and less personnel to develop their campaigns. The result is less money spent on resources, freeing up budget for focused initiatives that make a bigger splash, have a greater reach, and generate an awesome return on investment. Marketing automation is so efficient and effective, in fact, that those surveyed experienced a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead (1).
Benefits Of CPaaS: Take The Complication Out Of Communication
Revenues from Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) are projected to grow to $ 5.2 billion in 2023, and 67% of enterprises expect CPaaS to have an impact on their organization within the next three to five years. But what exactly is CPaaS? And what are the benefits of CPaaS for your business?
What is CPaaS?
The term CPaaS refers to a cloud-based platform that makes it easier for developers to add API-driven communications and microservices to their apps without having to build the back-end infrastructure themselves. These capabilities can cover every channel – voice, SMS, email, and social – as well as automated communication mechanisms like chatbots.
A CPaaS offering will provide developers with APIs, sample code, and software tools, as well as support to help them through the process of implementation. These tools can be configured by the developer to meet the needs of a particular app or service.
What are the benefits of CPaaS?
CPaaS makes it much simpler and feasible to integrate communications features into your app or service, connecting directly to end users and consumers. Providers that can deliver multiple communications services – from enterprise messaging to social media and Rich Communication Services (RCS) – through a single API can enable enterprises to reach a new level of agility by adding the channels they need, when they need them, without extensive development work and investment. It also handles other important considerations, like authentication, securely identifying that you are speaking to the right user, regardless whether you’re reaching out to them via SMS or they’re contacting you over WhatsApp.
Leading CPaaS platforms also offer intelligent messaging APIs that use failover rules, user preferences and response patterns, and data connectivity to escalate and route messages automatically among push, SMS, social, and other channels. This is vital in the modern experience economy, where connected customers expect to communicate with businesses in a contextual way that suits their needs.
How is CPaaS being used?
When Emmi Group, the largest dairy producer in Switzerland, began its digital transformation, the No. 1 priority was creating a personalized customer experience in order to get closer to customers. By utilizing an API from a CPaaS provider, Emmi easily integrated email services into its existing digital marketing platform to help drive a 31% increase in customer traffic and a three-fold increase in conversion rate.
Meanwhile, Swedish mobile network operator Netmore Group AB used APIs to simplify access to a global digital communications network and integrated interconnectivity services for its customer base of developers. In less than one day, secure and reliable engagement services were easily integrated into app projects, and the average development cycles of new apps were reduced by more than four weeks using sample use cases and code, interactive documentation, and analytics tools.
As the growth of CPaaS continues, we anticipate an ever-increasing variety of use cases as developers continue to take advantage of the vastly simplified communications tools it puts at their fingertips.
Learn more about how CPaaS providers and APIs are helping developers successfully launch new digital engagement services and improve experiences:
Join the SAP Digital Interconnect Community here.
This article originally appeared on SAP News Center.
5 Benefits of Integrating Intuit QuickBooks and Dynamics 365 CRM using InoLink
Dynamics 365 CRM as we know it is a business application system that adapts itself to the changing needs.
In our previous post, you were given a brief introduction of which now is a Microsoft Preferred Solution on AppSource integrating Dynamics 365 CRM and Intuit QuickBooks.
In this post we will focus on What, How and Why InoLink is an ideal solution for integrating Dynamics 365 CRM and Intuit QuickBooks.
What is InoLink?
InoLink is a bi-directional integration solution that integrates Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Intuit QuickBooks. It streamlines the information flow between QuickBooks and Dynamics 365 CRM by seamlessly interconnecting activities belonging to different functional areas in both application systems. Thus, InoLink characteristically provides a history and Aging details from QuickBooks to Dynamics 365 CRM.
How does it help?
InoLink provides seamless integration between Dynamics 365 CRM and Intuit QuickBooks. Let’s see how does it benefits Dynamics 365 CRM users:
Accounting View of Customer
InoLink enables to view customer balances and aging details from within Dynamics 365 CRM. The resulting smooth flow of information between the two systems allows better coordination between Sales and Accounting teams which in turn helps the sales team to make impactful decisions leading to higher ROI.
InoLink makes it possible to integrate multiple QuickBooks companies with one instance of Dynamics 365 CRM. This heightens the feasibility of interaction between QuickBooks and Dynamics 365 CRM and doesn’t require creating new instance of Dynamics 365 CRM for every QuickBooks Company.
Hosted on Azure
InoLink is a Cloud-Based solution and in this era of cloud services it becomes a basic necessity to store data on cloud. This allows the users to access InoLink and sync their companies with Dynamics 365 CRM in more effective and diverse manner.
Real-time Data Processing
With InoLink, any update made in Dynamics 365 CRM records gets reflected in Intuit QuickBooks. This real-time synchronization doesn’t require any manual intervention and expedites the business process thus, leaving room to conduct other significant tasks.
InoLink avoids data duplication by linking existing Accounts/Contacts/Products in Dynamics 365 CRM and QuickBooks. This helps the users to not only synchronize data but also maintain data integrity across both Dynamics 365 CRM and QuickBooks.
Prior to InoLink, users had no access to accounting data in Dynamics 365 CRM. This made it hard to get latest customer information and take necessary decisions pertaining to sales and services. But all this is swept aside with InoLink. Users can now have a 360-degree view of customer accounting information, avoid duplication of data, get effective real time synchronization between Dynamics 365 CRM and QuickBooks, calculate tax and maintain data integrity. What seemed to be an uphill task before is now effectively handled with just few clicks! Hence, it can be rightfully said that InoLink is an ideal solution for integrating Dynamics 365 CRM with Intuit QuickBooks.
For more information, download the app from our or for a FREE trial of 15 days.
Benefits Of Shifting To The Cloud
In today’s digital economy, quickly capturing and translating data into valuable insights is an essential aspect of business. For many companies, this presents a challenge, both financially and logistically.
Why pay for software that may be obsolete in just a few years?
Why implement a new software system that is unable to meet shifting business needs in the long run?
Is it possible to integrate existing on-premises software into a more modern, efficient platform?
These are all common questions asked by business leaders today. Luckily, there is an excellent solution to these concerns: cloud computing.
Leverage best practices from market data
Transitioning to cloud software has many benefits, including the ability to obtain data in real-time. Being able to make business decisions quickly based on accurate data can drastically increase a company’s success and competitive advantage.
One instance of this occurred with JK Tyre, India’s leading tire manufacturer. JK Tyre’s success rides on the strength of its over 3,500 dealers and more than 400 field sales personnel. However, non-integrated front-office operations were causing significant information lag and dealer dissatisfaction.
To rectify the problem, the company set out to digitize its front-office operations. Using a cloud platform, the company rolled out a comprehensive portal that provides dealers and sales personnel with clear, real-time transparency into operations. As a result, the company now ranks as the 22nd-largest tire manufacturer in the world, producing 32 million tires a year in 12 manufacturing plants.
Accelerate adoption of new innovations while reducing upgrade efforts
Since cloud technology is hosted by the service provider, automatic updates are installed without the delays that occasionally occur with traditional on-premises software. This agility and flexibility improve enterprise efficiency and create quicker turnaround times for customers.
FRANKA EMIKA is a Munich-based robotics startup on a mission to make robots accessible for everyone. After achieving rapid growth in a short time, FRANKA EMIKA needed to overcome significant IT and process complexities to keep its operations as agile as possible.
By implementing a cloud ERP solution specifically designed for fast-growth businesses, FRANKA EMIKA was able to quickly innovate and react to customer demands in a flexible way. Moreover, the technology enables the company to automate a variety of processes to quickly improve, manufacture, and deliver products that improve people’s lives and help the world run better.
Migrate existing data into a robust cloud platform
When it comes to making the shift to cloud, many businesses are hesitant due to a perceived lack of time and resources needed to migrate an entire complex infrastructure. However, the reality is that cloud adoption increases operational speed, simplicity, and cost efficiency at a faster rate than traditional on-premises solutions.
By 2021, Natura Cosméticos plans to migrate all of its existing on-premises applications to the cloud. Now the company can track customer orders using geoprocessing, integrate with banks in real-time, and save signatures digitally for compliance purposes. This example demonstrates how investment in a cloud platform is a key part of a successful business model because it allows for ongoing improvements using new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence.
Benefit from subscription-based pricing
One of the most notable benefits of switching to cloud is the subscription-based pricing model. This model gives the customer an alternative to making a large upfront investment by choosing whether to renew the contract after the initial term. This generates a higher ROI through a faster time to value and a predictable cost over time.
In addition to cost savings, the subscription model allows for agility during the decision-making process. Whether the company chooses to renew the cloud subscription or pursue an alternate strategy, this model provides the ability to make timely business decisions that are best for the company.
The following graphic highlights some of the key cloud deployment statistics:
Cloud as a strategic growth tool
With relentless technological advancements and innovation capabilities, all enterprises, regardless of size, should consider making the switch to cloud software. With it comes an unlimited potential to improve business outcomes and achieve growth as an intelligent enterprise.
Learn how to overcome the challenges associated with the move to SAP S/4HANA and how to manage your project successfully in our SAP S/4HANA Movement Webinar Series.
The Key Benefits of Marketing Automation
Even the largest, most experienced, most informed, and well-resourced marketing teams find it difficult to stay ahead of the latest marketing trends and adjust their marketing efforts accordingly. Now, just imagine what it’s like being part of those 1-2 person teams that are simply trying to keep their head above water. If that’s where you stand as a marketer, then you understand what it feels like knowing that something has to change if your organization is to remain competitive, but you might feel like you have very little control or time to do anything about it.
While many articles seem to focus on what you should be doing to enhance our marketing strategy, very few explore the resources available to help you execute these changes without breaking the bank or exhausting your team. With this element missing from the conversation, adopting a different approach and improving your marketing efforts might seem out of reach
However, emerging technologies eliminate traditional barriers to marketing success. Today’s tools are designed to help marketers deliver more targeted campaigns more efficiently using less time and fewer resources. While there are many marketing software options depending on your budget and goals, marketing automation is the one most likely to generate the best return on investment for marketing teams of any size.
The reason marketing automation stands out in the endless sea of marketing technology software is that it enables marketers to do more with less, save money, and generate better results. By investing in marketing automation, companies improve their ability to target their audience, build long-lasting relationships with customers, and equip both their marketing and sales teams with the resources they need to drive conversions.
But that only begins to cover the many ways that marketing automation can drastically enhance your marketing strategy. Keep reading to learn more about how this innovative technology can help you reach your marketing goals.
Improve Your Ability to Meet Your Customers Wherever They’re at in the Customer Journey
Have you ever suffered the embarrassment of chiming in on a conversation with an irrelevant comment at an inappropriate time? It’s not fun having a room full of people stare at you like you’re a lunatic, is it?
Unfortunately, this is a situation that marketers experience time and time again in an effort to get their customers the information they need. When you have a billion customers, all at different stages in the funnel, it can be overwhelming to figure out who needs what and when.
While the obvious workaround is to perform manual segmentation to group customers based on where they’re at in the sales funnel, this process is time-consuming and prone to error. You probably think that segmenting your audience just isn’t worth all the time and effort if you can’t guarantee that you’re going to do it right, but that’s all the more reason to create more effective and accurate processes. Today’s customers expect companies to deliver personalized recommendations at every stage of the buyer journey that inform and educate them about your industry and your products and services. Companies and marketing teams that fail to do this are at a severe disadvantage.
The good thing is that, with marketing automation, the days of spending countless hours segmenting your contacts only to still send some of them the wrong message are over. Features such as lead scoring and website visitor tracking allow you to pinpoint where your customers are in the customer journey and evaluate when it’s time for them to move on to the next stage. Furthermore, adaptive segmentation enables you to automatically group your customers on a wide variety of characteristics so you can deliver targeted marketing and content recommendations that match much more than just their stage in the sales funnel.
Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
Despite marketing’s best efforts to attract prospective customers and nurture them into qualified leads, this work is only worthwhile if sales can convert these leads into loyal customers. The failure to do so often involves miscommunication on both sides. Many times, your marketing team might be attracting a lot of new leads, but they aren’t always the type of leads the sales team is looking for. Or, when marketing does manage to attract better leads, your salespeople might lack the tools and insights they need to close the deal.
Solving this ongoing issue requires much more than weekly check-in meetings. Both teams need to be able to determine whether a lead is a good fit, nurture them through the customer journey, know when a lead is ready to talk to sales, and have more targeted conversations once the decision stage comes around.
Marketing automation gives you the tools to strengthen the alignment between marketing and sales teams so you can accomplish all that and more. Capabilities such as lead scoring enable you to identify your target customer and determine when they are ready to talk to a member of your sales team. Adaptive forms, gated landing pages, and website visitor tracking allow you to gain valuable insights that will help you engage your customers throughout the lead nurturing process and know the right things to say when the time comes to seal the deal.
Of course, marketing automation provides you with tools to bridge the gap between marketing and sales, but you still need to meet with your team to determine how you’ll make it work. Before launching your marketing automation efforts, we suggest collaborating with your sales team to determine which criteria you’ll use for your lead scoring program and what kind of information they need in order to have impactful conversations with customers.
Equip Your Team with the Tools They Need to Do More with Less Manual Effort
Lack of time is usually one of the biggest obstacles marketers face on their quest to improve their marketing strategy. Tasks such as setting up emails, manually segmenting lists, and gathering data from disparate sources can often take up a lot of your time. Not to mention, many of us have to perform these tasks over and over again as we gain new contact information from prospective customers.
The time it takes to handle everyday tasks leaves little room for us to stop and think about whether the tasks we’re executing are effective in the first place. And even if we do have a few moments to spare to identify areas where we can enhance our current strategy, we don’t have the time and resources to implement any changes.
This is one of the many areas where marketing automation stands out from your basic email service provider (ESP). Unlike an ESP, marketing automation allows you to automatically launch essential everyday marketing tasks without the work traditionally required. For example, you can create a welcome email that launches every time somebody signs up for your mailing list or automatically enter contacts into a relevant email nurture campaign whenever they reach certain criteria based on your lead scoring model. Furthermore, if you invest in a marketing automation platform that supports a wide range of integrations, you can improve your ability to launch and measure the effectiveness of your efforts across platforms.
In short, marketing automation allows you to do more with less. It equips you with the tools you need to make the process of executing everyday marketing tasks more efficient and helps you achieve better results. Perhaps most importantly, it frees up time and provides you with the resources you need to get a little more creative and personalized with your marketing efforts, especially if you’re part of a small team.
Test Your Efforts and Gather the Insights You Need to Improve Your Marketing
Even if you have a robust marketing strategy and experienced marketing team, you’ll probably hit a wall with your marketing efforts if you don’t take time to test and measure your performance. While you might have a sense of which efforts perform best with your different audience segments, which subject lines they might find most appealing, and which content is most likely to keep them moving through the sales funnel, it’s always best to gather that information straight from the source and focus on the data rather than your assumptions or intuition.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to invest all your efforts talking to and surveying your target audience. Marketing automation empowers you to A/B test everything from email subject lines to CTAs to design so that you can easily determine which elements are more likely to motivate your target audience to take action. Even better, marketing automation allows you to consolidate data from various sources (including your website, social media, forms, and email) so you can get a more comprehensive view of how you should be modifying your marketing efforts to match the preferences of your target customers.
Marketing Automation Allows You to Maximize Your ROI Like Never Before
Let’s be honest, the main reason that most of us want to improve our marketing strategy and launch more targeted efforts is that it increases our chance of success. At the end of the day, we want to show that the work we do is attracting more leads, yielding better engagement, and driving conversions.
Marketing automation allows you to do just that by equipping you with everything you need to enhance your marketing, optimize the customer journey, and generate the best ROI — all while saving you time and resources. If you’d like a more in-depth exploration of the benefits of marketing automation, please download our eBook, Making Marketing Automation a Reality (linked below).
Keeping Your Options Open: The Benefits of an Open Marketing Automation Ecosystem
If you’re new to marketing automation technology and don’t know where to begin your search, choosing a package deal might seem like the best way to go. After all, it seems like every marketing automation solution is partnering with a customer relationship management (CRM) system these days. And the fact that these solutions are sold as a package deal must mean they have everything you need to realize your marketing goals, right? Not necessarily.
Although the one-size-fits-all approach might work well for some organizations, being married to a specific set of tools might not be what’s best as your organizational and marketing goals continue to evolve. The last thing you want is to be stuck with a MarTech stack you’ve outgrown and incur the cost of having to go back to the drawing board to find a new set of solutions that work for you. Or, worse yet, you can try to patch up what you have and end up with a disconnected MarTech stack that creates more problems for your organization than it solves.
When it comes to marketing automation platforms, choosing a vendor with an open ecosystem (that is, multiple integration options) can empower you to adopt a MarTech stack that grows with your needs and goals. Open MarTech ecosystems give you the flexibility to shop around and make sure that every technology solution you choose has the tools and resources you need. Better yet, you can ensure that you have a way to connect your resources and gain a full view of how your marketing strategy is performing as a whole.
But this only begins to cover the perks of choosing a marketing automation platform with a wide selection of native integrations like Act-On. If you’re on the fence about whether investing in a marketing automation platform with an open ecosystem is the best option for you, these are a few other benefits to consider.
Improve Marketing Efficiency by Choosing Tools You Love and Need
Any person who has moved from one company to another knows that every marketing team has its own goals and way of doing things. In many cases, trying to adapt your work style to match the capabilities of the tools you’re working with can be more trouble than it’s worth. Not only that, it can be extremely frustrating to not be able to accomplish your objectives if the marketing tools you own don’t have all the features you need to get the job done.
Building a MarTech stack consisting of solutions that allow you to do what you want in a way that works for you improves your efficiency and empowers you to do better marketing. The time and resources you save in not having to do a workaround to get the job done allow you to get those creative juices flowing and focus your efforts on more pressing and impactful tasks.
Offer Your Audience a Personalized Experience Wherever They Go
Personalization is the key to attracting more and better leads and driving conversion rates. With brands like Amazon and Facebook offering customers personalized recommendations wherever they go online, your target audience has become accustomed to tailor-made content and product suggestions and expect all companies they interact with to follow suit.
Offering your target audience a tailored experience, however, becomes difficult when you’re dealing with a disconnected MarTech stack and don’t have a way of gauging what they want or seamlessly activating your marketing efforts. If your marketing automation platform does not support a wide array of integrations and allow you to handle everything from email and social to your website all in one place, you run the risk of delivering random and scattered messages to your customers. This does nothing to convey the value you bring to the table and leaves the door wide open for your competitors to step in and win over the leads you’ve worked so hard to attract.
An open ecosystem, in contrast, enables you to make sure that every single tool in your MarTech stack works well together. This improves your ability to launch cohesive and targeted campaigns and track customer engagement and behavior metrics that enable you to continuously improve the personalization of your marketing efforts.
Drive Marketing and Sales Alignment
One of the greatest benefits of marketing automation is that it can help drive marketing and sales alignment, giving your salespeople access to valuable insights that empower them to have more impactful and targeted conversations. To do that, however, you need to ensure everybody feels comfortable using the technology you’ve invested in. If the marketing automation and CRM pairing you choose doesn’t have the tools your sales team needs to be successful, chances are they won’t use these tools to their full potential.
A marketing automation platform that integrates with a wide array of CRMs provides you the flexibility to choose a tool that your sales team will leverage on a daily basis. Furthermore, ensuring your CRM and marketing automation are fully connected enables you to drive alignment by automatically delivering your salespeople the insights on customer engagement and behavior you’ve worked so hard to collect.
Transform Your Marketing Strategy with Improved Access to Insights and Analytics
Any seasoned marketer knows that marketing trends and customer needs are constantly evolving, and we have to be ready to adapt and deliver what they need if we want to continue to stand out. Enhancing your strategy, however, is only possible if you have a holistic view of your target audiences’ needs and the overall performance of your marketing efforts.
An open marketing automation platform that fully integrates with the tools and resources you need to measure and consolidate your insights makes that process much easier. Instead of pulling information from various places and spending countless hours trying to identify which efforts are driving the most revenue, you can see how all your efforts are performing in one central location. This allows you to more easily make adjustments to your marketing strategy and ensure you’re always putting your best efforts out into the world.
Choose a Vendor That Is Willing to Deliver the Integrations You Need
The right marketing automation vendor should have your best interests in mind and not limit you in what you can do with your marketing strategy. That means they should be willing to provide you with the tools, resources, and integrations you need to achieve your marketing goals.
At Act-On, our open ecosystem aligns with our mission to empower marketers to perform the best work of their careers. We have native integrations with the leading tools and CRMs (most recently adding Pipeliner CRM to the mix) so that our customers’ marketing and sales teams have the tools to identify, engage, and nurture hot opportunities coming through the door.
If you want to learn more about the benefits of choosing a marketing automation platform that integrates well with your CRM and MarTech stack, please download our eBook, “Got CRM? Here’s Why You Need Marketing Automation, Too,” (linked below).