Are you leading a marketing or sales team? Are you aware of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Automation software? If not, then there are chances that you make a wrong choice that may harm your current working strategies.

CRM and marketing automation have different processes and utilizes different tools to fulfill different purposes. Most of the time many marketing and sales leader faces confusion between the two. This is because both the software deals with similar customer information and similar work to generate leads. But managing the leads and information is an entirely different process and is the separate matter of concern for both the software.

Basic Difference Between The Two

Target Audience: The basic difference between the two software is the audience who they target. Generally, CRM software is sales-oriented while marketing automation software focuses on marketing. On one hand where marketing automation software allows the company to streamline, automate and to measure marketing tasks, CRM manages all the company's interactions with current prospective customers.

Objective: Although both CRM and Marketing Automation tool seems to be similar both designed with different objectives. Marketing automation generates marketing qualified leads (MQL) while CRM converts MQL to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and ultimately to sale. Thus it can be said that both marketing automation and CRM are complementary to each other and work to transform leads into a potential customer.

Need for Software: Generally a company demands marketing automation software in either of the following cases:

  1. Your customer list grows too big that make it difficult for you to handle the long email list. 
  2. Your customer list is too small and you need to feed more leads to the sales team.
  3. You want to present your great and awesome blogs in front of the target audience.

On the other hand, the need for CRM arises in cases like:

  1. Continuous reporting of bad customer services.
  2. To track the lost customers.
  3. You have a long list of lead data in your tracking system.

Still Confused, Which One To Opt?

Although you might have understood the difference between the two software, but still struggling to choose the one that goes best with your business? We can help you to choose the best. jiMailer will inspect your business type and offer you the best software that helps you in running your business smoothly. 

Generally, small businesses usually opt for CRM software that help them to optimize the bottom of the sales funnel and results in more lead conversion while as the company grows or the existing big firms invest more on strategic marketing efforts thus choosing Marketing Automation Software.

If your company has acquired good growth after integrating CRM into their system then you can progress more by further implementing the marketing automation system and to use both the system together. This will prevent you from storing reductant information, spending the extra money and helps your firm in building a better customer relationship.