Pipedrive and ActiveDEMAND Integration Maximize Conversions with Sales and Marketing Alignment
The successful alignment of sales and marketing isn’t just a nice thing to have for ‘brand consistency.’
A powerful connection between your marketing and sales pipeline is a core foundation for a fast scaling business.
There are so many factors that contribute to fast growth, but one of the most common technical similarities across the growth teams of winning start-ups is a powerful real-time integration between a sales CRM and a marketing automation platform.
Over the course of the buyer’s journey, your prospect will almost always engage with both your marketing information AND your sales operations.
To the frustration of every sales and marketing manager on the planet – the buyer journey is not linear.
When you consult your analytics to report on performance, you might expect to see your prospects carefully working through every stage of your marketing funnel in perfect order.
But the report you generate will look less like a carefully mapped destination route and more like the map of a confused hiker.
As much as we all yearn for the perfect workflow through our carefully crafted funnels, our prospects prefer the pinball approach. You need to develop a clear ideal buyer journey to assist your prospect at any stage of the decision-making process. You just can’t expect everyone to enter and progress in the same way.
This means marketing and sales must work closely together to understand what help a prospect needs to convert at any given time.
Synchronizing your sales CRM and your marketing automation platform
With the help of two sales and marketing experts, we want to share some insights to highlight the benefits of integrating your sales CRM with your marketing automation platform.
CEO of ActiveDEMAND, Sean Leonard and Pipedrive’s Customer Marketing Manager, Kila Pickering, explain why system alignment between the two platforms is so important.
We’ll also explore some real situations where Pipedrive and ActiveDEMAND customers have used this integration with significant success.
While there are many options for your sales and marketing team to consider, many technology platforms struggle to communicate with each other – turning your tracking, reporting and ongoing sales operations into a minefield of confusion and manual work.
Few systems can boost the seamless integration between ActiveDEMAND’s marketing automation platform and Pipedrive’s sales CRM. We’re so happy to be able to provide this option to our customers, and Kila and Sean outline why this killer combination is the driver of scalable growth.
What are important factors your agency and/or B2B clients are looking for?
Sean Leonard:
Lead management is always an important factor.
Businesses are not only concerned with growth, they are looking for scalable growth. I know that both Pipedrive and ActiveDEMAND are designed to power teams looking to scale fast.
Businesses seeking this scalability are taking a close look at their lead management process and the systems associated with those.
I see three main challenges that brands face when managing their leads:
- Number one is the disconnect between marketing and sales.
- Often, they lack alignment in their goals and/or processes – or even what defines a lead.
- Secondly, they lack technology integration in automating lead management which magnifies alignment problems.
- Well integrated systems control the synchronization of when sales reps are engaging and when marketing should be communicating with leads.
- Finally, many companies do not apply customer data into metrics or analytics that enables distribution of more qualified leads from marketing to sales.
- After a lead is generated, marketing needs to continuously communicate activity to Pipedrive to accelerate prospects through the sales funnel, automating the deal progression and adjusting drip campaigns as needed.
How can companies address automated lead management issues for sales and marketing?
Kila Pickering:
We see many brands looking for a complete solution for lead generation, sales nurturing and overall lead management.
That includes being able to track engagement in various stages and create meaningful metrics for the sales and marketing teams.
Many companies want to apply the historical data they have on their leads to get better insight into characteristics like length of buying cycle and average conversion rates.
Founders, managers, and executives realize most of this data comes from the marketing side of the equation.
After a lead is forwarded to sales, the prospect will continue to interact with various marketing campaigns and content. A prospect might download an eBook, read a blog article, open an email newsletter or attend a webinar.
Sales need visibility into that engagement in their CRM system. This contextual info helps accelerate the sales process by providing insight for follow-up conversations. The sales reps will be so much more likely to make use of that data if their marketing automation system can present this in their CRM activity view.
Busy reps and all-rounders managing conversations with leads don’t have time to piece this info together manually. Most salespeople will love the ability to find this info in the CRM hub they are using daily to keep track of their conversations and sales activities.
Who has seen success by integrating these solutions to improve their sales and marketing alignment?
Sean:
An excellent example would be DaBrian Marketing Group, a mutual client using the Pipedrive and ActiveDEMAND integration.
They are a full-service digital marketing agency whose philosophy is the value of their client’s data relies on context and customization, and they strive to discover the insights that actually matter to the business and deliver true value.
I did my homework for this question! I asked Daniel Laws, DaBrian’s President and CEO, what he considered the main business challenge that Pipedrive and ActiveDEMAND integration addressed for him and his team:
“Pipedrive and ActiveDEMAND help to improve our sales and marketing with campaign tracking. Often, the sales and marketing activities are viewed separately.
When our CRM and Marketing platforms work together, they provide our clients with the ability to measure the overall effectiveness of the sales team and marketing tactics that are moving prospective customers through the sales funnel.”
As a digital marketing agency, DaBrian recognizes the volume of information prospects provide through their digital engagement long before their buyer’s journey takes them into contact with the sales team. Pipedrive and ActiveDEMAND working together enable them to make the most of this data.
ActiveDEMAND grants visibility into prospect behaviors by gathering information on web activities and responses to marketing efforts such as email campaigns, social media and other types of engagement.
Flexible lead scoring options and workflows control what leads and activity are synchronized with Pipedrive.
The more sales understand the customer, the more targeted and strategic they will be in their communications.
Kila:
There is a key factor you need to consider in this type of integration.
Synchronization occurs as it happens – in real time.
As the saying goes: time is money. Whether it’s a prospect looking at multiple options or a sales team juggling multiple leads in different stages of the sales pipeline, there are so many opportunities for communication inefficiencies to creep and hijack your process.
These inefficiencies can drag out the sales cycle longer than necessary and jeopardize the success of the sale.
Automation minimizes lost time by sending the most relevant content at the right time.
Sean:
Daniel completely agreed with this sentiment when I asked him about the primary value of having that tight alignment between their sales and marketing platforms:
“The main value that Pipedrive and ActiveDEMAND integration provides is the abilities to engage prospects, prioritize sales activities with lead scoring and shorten the sales cycle.”
Kila:
Agreed. When marketers are sending many of their leads too early, they are wasting important revenue-generating opportunities.
A tight integration with ActiveDEMAND provides the flexibility required to adjust your lead scores based on qualifying activities.
This determines when leads are truly ready to move along the sales cycle.
When the moment arrives, a seamless integration with Pipedrive gives the sales team access to relevant marketing data at the right time in the right place.
The result?
Both teams are enabled to improve their performance in real-time. You’re building in automation – not just to save time – but also to improve your chances of converting. This gives you a sustainable way to achieve a higher close rate without adding more time or complexity to your sales process.
Synchronize Pipedrive with ActiveDEMAND to maximize efficiency in your processes
We’d like to thank Sean, Daniel, and Kila for their insights and advice on improving your sales and marketing alignment.
Integrating Pipedrive with ActiveDEMAND promotes efficiency across the board through live-updating cross-divisional synchronization.
Because it saves the marketing and sales teams time, money, and effort, they will be free to focus more effectively on their common goal: closing business.
If you’re looking for more inspiration on how to strengthen the connection between sales and marketing in your organization, there’s plenty more practical tactics, insights, and advice you need to consider.
How to install Pipedrive’s ActiveDEMAND integration right now
If you’re not already an ActiveDEMAND user, you can sign up for a free trial today to test out the platform with your team.
If you are already using Pipedrive, you can investigate our ActiveDEMAND integration right now. Head over to the Pipedrive Marketplace to read more detailed information about Pipedrive’s ActiveDEMAND integration.
You’ll find a simple guide to installation and setup and a direct link to start your install.
