Dynamics CRM and Dynamics Marketing (MDM): an integrated approach to better business impact!

As a marketing major, I strongly believe in the power of a collaborative approach between the Sales and Marketing teams. More often than not, the sales and marketing teams work in silos – the sales teams complaining that marketing is not giving them quality leads and the marketing teams complaining that they are not given due credit to the leads that they generate. Most marketers and marketing managers feel that they feel pressurized and helpless when it comes to calculating the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). This is mainly because there are very few mechanisms to determine the exact influence of marketing on any sale. Marketing has no way of getting seamless information from the sales teams to understand how well the campaigns are performing in real time or how are the newly generated leads responding to their sales pitches or how quickly are the leads getting converted into opportunities or sales. The marketing teams couldn't tweak their campaigns in real-time due to the difficulty in collecting field information from the sales teams. The sales and the marketing teams working in silos has been crippling businesses and undermining the overarching business goals for quite some time now.

Reducing this dependency on each other and improving transparency is one of the major highlights of an integrated approach. That is why I am a strong proponent of having a CRM-MDM integrated approach in organizations. As we start this discussion, you will realize that each of the above challenges will slowly wear off and turn you into a believer, if not a proponent.

Let's start with a simple CRM-MDM integrated scenario like this:

I create a multi-channel marketing campaign in MDM which generates some leads in MDM. Based on the lead scoring model that I have specified in my marketing campaign (in MDM), the leads will get scored. Once the leads are sales ready, they get automatically synchronized from MDM to CRM from where the sales people can pick them up. The sales teams start engaging with the leads and eventually, some get converted into Opportunities and ultimately result in Sales. The Opportunities are then synchronized from CRM back into MDM.

Problem1: Sales people complaining that they are getting quality leads from Marketing.

Solution: The sales team now has complete visibility on how many leads got generated from the marketing campaign. The Lead source field will display the campaign that generated the Lead. Depending on whether the lead gets converted into Opportunity or by looking at the ratio of leads that get converted to a sale, they can understand the quality of the leads that get generated via the marketing campaigns. They now have the correct data to back up their claims or the marketing teams now have the data to disprove the sales teams if need be!

Problem2: Marketing people lose visibility of their leads the moment the leads move to the sales teams. They have no real-time data to follow the lead life-cycle or to understand the number of leads that result in sale.

Solution: The Opportunities are synchronized back into MDM from the CRM system. The information includes the probability of sale, and the expected amount and the weighted amount based on the probability of sale. Any update in any of these fields by the sales person is reflected back into MDM. The marketing teams now know the exact impact that they are creating – how many leads, how much of revenue from their campaigns etc. It's easier for them to calculate the ROMI as well.

Problem3: Dependency on each other.

Solution: Both the sales and the marketing teams will have a complete 360 degree view of the situation. Using the 'Seller Portal' option, even sales people (from within CRM itself) get to understand the campaigns that are being run on their leads or contacts. They can then tweak their conversations based on what they find, to deliver maximum impact. Similarly, the marketing teams understand the work that the sales people are putting in to engage with the leads that were generated as part of their campaign. All this with minimal interaction between the two teams and none of them wasting their valuable time trying to get the information from the other.