ActiveDEMAND and Pipedrive Take Sales and Marketing Integration to the Next Level
Marketing agencies and B2B companies serious about sustainable growth for their business use a marketing automation platform (MAP) to automate marketing processes and centralize marketing campaigns, in addition to a customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage contacts, leads and other sales related business processes.
While everyone has some connection between their MAP and CRM, to truly take your marketing automation experience to the next level, you must fully integrate your marketing platform CRM system. ActiveDEMAND and Pipedrive do just that.
Tight integration with your marketing platform and CRM systems allow for the transfer of lead information seamlessly between marketing and sales. Tight alignment between marketing and sales improves the effectiveness of campaigns and provides a better return on your software and marketing investments.
Basics of Integrating Systems
First off, integration between your marketing platform and CRM system must be bi-directional. Integration means the CRM system talks to the marketing automation platform and the marketing automation platform talks to the CRM system. When a prospect engages with a marketing asset, the CRM should be aware of that action, and when a prospect moves farther down the sales funnel, the marketing system needs that information to adjust the marketing activities accordingly.
Customer prospects are in constant flux – changing roles or departments, organizational shifts, or mergers, etc. Organizations make regular updates to their customer and prospect records within the CRM system based on sales calls, and that data must synchronize with the marketing automation platform. Not only does this ensure consistency in the data between the two systems but it is very important for database segmentation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and many other contact handling functions.
Communication between the marketing platform and CRM is more than static contact fields such as a title field or email domain. Real integration involves synchronizing contact action and engagement context.
Taking System Integration to The Next Level
Agencies and business owners looking to take their marketing and sales efforts to the next level should consider advanced integration activities.
Here is a list of functions a Marketing Automation system that is tightly integrated with a CRM and should perform:
The ActiveDEMAND and Pipedrive integration meet all these needs and more, such as:
- Automating Deal progressions
- Automatic lead insertion
- Contact insertions
- Click to call
- Deal closed won posting to ActiveDEMAND
- Scheduled contact sync
- Lead scoring
- and more
ActiveDEMAND is used to market to prospects, nurture leads, and report on marketing/sales results. Not all data from the marketing platform should go to CRM – there are many very early stage actions a prospect may take that are not yet ready for sales engagement. Using automation, you can determine which prospect activities are ready for sales and which are not.
Consider a base case: Data flowing to Pipedrive from ActiveDEMAND happens when a prospect does something that ActiveDEMAND is tracking – such as a prospect filling out a form. This could create a new deal in Pipedrive.
The flow of data FROM ActiveDEMAND to Pipedrive is controlled using the Lead Processing workflows. Since most business work off the premise that marketing ‘assumes’ many things about a prospect, and the salespeople actually ‘know’ what reality is for a prospect, then the logical belief is the data in Pipedrive is ‘more accurate’ than that in ActiveDEMAND. Therefore, when a contact updates in Pipedrive, we should tell ActiveDEMAND about the contact. Data flowing FROM Pipedrive to ActiveDEMAND is handled automatically. The CRM Contact Update system sets up the connection between Pipedrive and ActiveDEMAND. Though not a scheduler, there is a real-time update from the CRM to marketing platform whenever a contact is updated in Pipedrive.
How to Automatically update contacts in ActiveDEMAND from Pipedrive
One of the more powerful features of the ActiveDEMAND-Pipedrive integration is the ability to update contacts in ActiveDEMAND automatically. Automatically push changes from Pipedrive to ActiveDEMAND by using the contact import scheduler. Pipedrive updates ActiveDEMAND whenever a contact is changed in Pipedrive. The import scheduler filter system gives you full control over what data and which contacts are automatically updated in ActiveDEMAND.
Synchronization happens whenever:
- An organization is updated
- A deal is updated
- A contact is updated
- A contact is created
As with any import, ActiveDEMAND will never delete data as a result of an import. Most fields will ‘update’ as a result of an import except for phone numbers and email addresses. Since contacts may have more than one email address, an import will append email addresses and phone numbers to the existing contact.
Automatically Push Prospect Activities to Pipedrive
If you are looking to have marketing email sends and marketing email opens tracked in Pipedrive, use the Activity Scheduler workflow item.
In Pipedrive, simply add new activity types:
- Marketing Email
- Email Open
- Email Link Click
- Asset Download
In ActiveDEMAND, under the Pipedrive Email Activity Posting, update each of the existing custom activity objects to map to the custom activities you created in the previous step. Be sure you assign a contact owner to each action as Pipedrive requires a contact owner for all engagement with a contact in Pipedrive. This ensures the right activity is directed to the correct sales person.
Integrating Click To Call
As ActiveDEMAND is a call tracking platform, you can do outbound call tracking from within Pipedrive. Pipedrive has a URL template to do outbound call tracking from within the browser.
In ActiveDEMAND, simply follow these steps:
- Confirm you have at least one call tracking number.
- Ensure any salesperson doing outbound calls is set up as an employee in ActiveDEMAND. They do not need to have a login, but they do need to be listed as an employee. Ensure their email address matches what is in Pipedrive.
- Ensure you have your API key from ActiveDEMAND and login URL from your account settings.
In Pipedrive, under Company settings find the Phone Number Link Syntax:
Simply update the field with the required URL format using the required login and API key information.
These examples give a brief overview of how easy it is to set up the powerful ActiveDEMAND and Pipedrive integration.
Final Thoughts
There are many different types of marketing automation platform and CRM integrations. While every company differs on how they integrate the two systems, they all have one thing in common – they want access to the pieces of data to communicate and sell better.
- Here are a few questions you should ask when evaluating your marketing automation platform and CRM choices:
- Do the two systems offer and support integration with each other?
- Can you define and reference new fields within the marketing automation platform and add them to your CRM integration?
- Is the synchronization between systems only schedule based, or will it trigger in real time?
- Can the marketing platform send leads to the CRM system based on a lead score?
- Can it send leads based on buyer behavior, engagement, or campaign goal completion?
- Can the system assign leads to sales reps based on workflow decisions such as lead score, prospect action, campaign events, etc.?
- Can the CRM trigger marketing campaign activities based on contact deal stage or activity, including removing prospects from marketing campaigns from within the CRM system?
- Do your marketing platform and CRM integration support click to call and call tracking to ensure all important sales activity is recorded and tracked?
ActiveDEMAND and Pipedrive offer the best-of-breed features for their respective fields. They not only connect with each other, they truly integrate. Easily understand and analyze customer behavior to ensure interactions are based on supported insights to provide better service for prospects and customers. Seamless integration optimizes customer relationships and provides aligned sales and marketing platforms with shared synchronized data and activity, yet are each designed to do what they do best.
Pipedrive is a sales CRM for small teams with big ambitions. Pipedrive is used by more than 10,000 customers around the world. Pipedrive is a simple and yet powerful tool for managing sales that integrates seamlessly with ActiveDEMAND. Click here to learn more about Pipedrive.
