Why Marketers Should Trust Their Salesforce CRM Data

Most marketing departments have a CRM and if you’ve moved from company to company, you’ve likely experienced more than one. As a result, you know that not all CRMs are created equal. Regardless, most well-known ones are very good at helping marketers and sales departments manage the customer journey, manage marketing efforts, and collect informative analytics on all the above. With analytics, you can see what is working and what isn’t in your marketing strategy and adjust as needed. Despite all these positives, there are marketers and executives out there who don’t trust CRM data and do not use it to inform their strategies and marketing-related choices.

Luckily, if you’re reading this article, then you are a marketer or stakeholder who uses Salesforce. As you likely know, Salesforce offers end-to-end capabilities that make the job of a marketer, customer service representative, and salesperson far easier. By providing one platform for previously disparate teams, the sales process and customer relationship-building process become far easier to manage and improve.

Here are four key reasons why you should trust your Salesforce CRM data and use it to your advantage.

CRM data is a valuable source of customer insights
Stay connected to your customers

Customer data is critical to any marketing plan because, without customers, you can’t have any sales. The Salesforce CRM is used to monitor the customer journey and provide a 360-degree view into the customer’s interactions with your resources as well as where they are on the internet. The platform also allows you to interact with them to improve the customer experience before, during, and after a purchase. By doing so, the CRM is able to connect data points living in siloed data sets for even more data to provide critical insights needed to continue to build lasting customer relationships.

As the loss of third-party cookies quickly approaches, CRMs, such as Salesforce, that are up-to-date on Google and Apple changes are finding new ways to present data that are invaluable to the marketing process. Again, we are stressing the data aspect here, but without it, marketers are essentially marketing blind. And when you market blind, you will most likely be putting time and money into elements of your strategy that will have minimal, if any, impact or ROI.

With a CRM, companies report:

- 52% more delivered proposals, quotes, or RFP responses with 11% more quotes resulting in orders
- 32% higher overall team attainment of sales quota and 24% more individual quota attainment
- 23% higher lead conversion rate
20-30% growth in business as productivity increases across sales, service, and operations

Know where your customer has been and is going

Remember when you were a kid in junior high or high school, and you had a crush on someone? You might have tried to hang out where they would hang out, go to the same party, and generally try and make sure they saw you as much as possible without them realizing you were trying to do so. This is similar to the relationship between a prospect and marketing.

When you’re targeting a specific prospect, accounts, or client type, you are attempting to have your brand show up in as many places that they frequent as possible – all without seemingly stalking them across the web or being annoying. It is a fine line to walk. However, this doesn’t work if you don’t know where your customer is on the web. Perhaps your marketer or stakeholders think TikTok is the place to market, but your client demographic is over the age of 50 – the likelihood that you will reach many customers on TikTok is slight. You may reach some, but you won’t reach many. Instead, by using your CRM’s data, you will be able to pinpoint where a majority of your customers are and go there with your marketing efforts.

Your CRM is designed to have accurate and up-to-date information
Eliminate blind spots in your data

How many times have you thought you knew something only to find out you didn’t have all the information and what you thought to be correct is actually incredibly wrong?

This often happens because, as humans, we can only know what we know, and if we don’t have the information, then we have a blind spot. Your CRM is designed and continues to improve to eliminate blind spots – data is a huge part of this. 

A good CRM solution automatically flows second- and third-party account and contact information into your CRM system, filling in missing information that salespeople left out and intelligently removing duplicates. 

Through this process, your data will be cleaner, and the artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions you may use will be able to further improve data.

Improve data with apps and automation

Salesforce and the Salesforce App Exchange offer various solutions that you can incorporate into your CRM to provide more, specific, and alternate data. 

With apps on AppExchange like Kudoz, marketers are equipped with the information they need to improve and expand marketing efforts for maximum ROI.

Drive marketing and sales decisions with CRM data insights
23% higher lead conversion rates with Salesforce

As a marketer, whether you are justifying budget, decisions, or outcomes, nothing speaks louder than when you can present data to support your words. With CRM data, you can present statistics that can support marketing strategy choices and changes, how your strategies are performing, and why your budget is supported by the performance of your marketing efforts.

As mentioned above, CRMs contribute to 23% higher lead conversion rates – this is because by analyzing the CRM data, marketers can target prospects more effectively and can keep your brand on their radar. Through Salesforce, you can interact with the customer at every step of the sales journey and the data provided will let you know what types of content and contact will be most effective for converting them from a prospect to an opportunity and then to a sale. Partnering with sales also helps to fill the gaps between marketing and a sale to drive those opportunity accounts across the finish line.
 
Building trust between marketing and stakeholders
Transforms marketing from data analysis to strategic planning

Unfortunately, statistics tell us that 80% of CEOs don’t trust marketers and are weary of data because of historically inaccurate or delayed reporting. This is understandable – but with CRM technology today, data is updated constantly, and with the right tools in place, data can be nearly flawless. In other words, the data of today and the future is absolutely trustworthy, and without it, making decisions on your marketing strategy will be incredibly difficult.

With CRMs such as Salesforce, reports can be produced and sent regularly to stakeholders to help build trust between them and marketing. To do so, you can use Salesforce to guide decisions by following three key tasks:

- Produce and share regular CRM reports in key metrics
- Incorporate these metrics into your conversation when addressing business and marketing goals
- Adopt Salesforce into your daily processes by reviewing and adjusting as needed based on metrics

Running a business without a CRM will cost you time and money
CMOs are missing out on revenue if they don't use CRM

Understanding why CRM data is critical is dependent on understanding why a CRM, in general, is necessary. Ultimately, without a CRM, your business will be wasting valuable resources attempting to close deals and will actually close less. Why? Well, sales teams generate a ton of data. Your website is visited by people every single day, perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of times, as is your social media. All of this is basic data. Compiled, we can be talking about tens of thousands of records every single day. One day of that would be a lot to manage, and a week of that data would be overwhelming.

What you don’t want is salespeople A, B, C, and D all calling and emailing the same contact because that contact looked at all of their LinkedIn pages, and the salespeople don’t know they are all working with the same contact. This contact will likely be highly annoyed and will have a negative impression of your company, believing you are disorganized and therefore must not have a good solution to their problem. If this happens with 5 out of every 10 prospects, your close rate at maximum would be 50%, but will most likely end up around 13-15%.

However, with a CRM, the contact would be assigned, and the salespeople would know that the contact has been contacted and who their sales representative is. With proper organization and categorization, your salespeople, customer service representatives, and your marketers can spend their time interacting with the most promising prospects and moving them through the sales funnel and maintaining the relationships after purchase. A CRM makes this possible and provides the data necessary to effectively accomplish business and sales goals.

Apps like Kudoz, can help simplify data-related activities when using Salesforce by identifying missing contacts, lead sources, and other data issues to improve your speed-to-value, analysis speeds, and the overall analytics insights gained. By using opportunity analyzer apps with your Salesforce CRM you will have powerful insights at your fingertips that you can leverage when speaking with stakeholders.

Looking to get more out of your data? Check out the Kudoz the Opportunity Analyzer App on the AppExchange, and connect with the author on the Trailblazer Community.

About the author: Eric Ramos, the founder of the Kudoz Salesforce App, has 15+ years of B2B Analytics experience helping marketers and revenue teams achieve growth through better attribution. Additionally, Ramos serves on the Salesforce Ecosystem Equality Partner Advisory Board, focusing on driving diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Salesforce ecosystem.