The “State of Marketing” study conducted by Social Media Today shows that 75% of all companies surveyed use some form of marketing automation tool.

However, this still means that a quarter of all companies do not use marketing automation. And that even though it could create growth for their company and better collaboration between sales and marketing.

The reasons why some companies still have not implemented marketing automation can be many, believes Marketing Lead at AlfaPeople, Gitte Højgaard Mouritsen.

Typically, the lack of marketing automation is due to companies being nervous about jumping into something they don’t know.

“It could be that the company is at such an early stage that it has not been prioritized. It may be that you have a different system. The most important thing is that you have a system where you can easily send data from marketing to sales and back again. If you don’t have that integration, many leads go to waste,” says Gitte Højgaard Mouritsen.

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Ties sales and marketing together

The analysis “Marketing Automation Increases Productivity” from Nucleus Research shows that marketing automation improves the company’s productivity by 20%. But not only that. The analysis also shows that the effects of marketing automation include increased revenue, faster lead conversion and a shorter sales cycle.

The reason for these significant benefits must be found in the ability of the marketing automation process to tie the sales and marketing departments together.

“With the help of marketing automation, you can see how many marketing steps a customer has gone through. That is, how hot the lead is. It helps to create a lead scoring system that shows how important it is to capture that lead. It helps with sales forecasting and with getting to the point of making an offer to a lead more quickly,” says Gitte Højgaard Mouritsen.

In other words, marketing automation makes the handover of data from marketing to sales and the sales process itself much more efficient.

Saves time for sales and marketing

Marketing automation is typically part of most CRM systems, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365. The advantage of using a system like Microsoft Dynamics 365 is that the Marketing module can be easily connected with the Sales module. And thus ensures a strong collaboration between sales and marketing.

“It saves time for marketing and for sales. Instead of marketing having to keep track of the calendar and send things out, it is done automatically. That way, marketing can do other activities which are just as important, but which you haven’t had time for,” says Gitte Højgaard Mouritsen.

Overall, Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives companies the opportunity to change the basis for making the right decisions, because you build your sales forecast and your work process on data rather than assumptions.

“In companies, there are often several layers of people who work with sales and marketing, and there are several departments that you expect to talk to each other, but don’t. You spend too much time collecting data instead of having a system where you enter important information about customers so that you can set up targets and forecasts for the specific customer. Pipeline and lead management further helps to have everything together in one place and provides the best overview of the customer and the opportunities that are available,” says Gitte Højgaard Mouritsen.

Are sales and marketing aligned? Answer 9 questions and find out.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is a complete marketing automation platform that can strengthen your communication and create customer journeys, and which can nurture leads so that they are ready for sales.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to, among other things:

Create Customer Journeys – You can create cross-channel customer journeys that help deliver the right message at the right time in the right channel.

Event Management – You can plan physical and digital events and seminars via an event portal. The event portal also makes it easy to keep track of registrations and who participated in the webinar.

Run sales and marketing in parallel and strengthen cooperation – You can create a single shared view of the hottest leads with data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales on contacts, leads and sales opportunities.

Make informed decisions based on data