Managing Multiple CRMS? Advice for Marketing Ops Teams to Drive Growth

Each leg of the customer journey can be quite different, especially when it crosses the boundaries between a company’s marketing, sales, and support services. An estimated 91% of organizations with over ten employees use a CRM, and 82% use additional automation and sales reporting tools.

Companies that practice broad data collection create a deep data pool, but how that data is interpreted often depends on which department is asking. Workflows can also change according to how data is presented, but interdepartmental cohesion depends on data unification. Without it, departments go in separate directions based on their habituated CRM’s different data interpretations.

It raises an important question: what if the customer notices these differences?

Make Unified Data Your Keystone

Accurate, streamlined CRM data significantly impacts the customer journey. It also affects decision-making from marketing, sales, and customer success teams, who need a consistent frame of reference when the data they need overlaps. At every departmental level, success depends on standardized processes based on accurate, timely, and complete data.

For companies balancing a patchwork of CRMs, data reconciliation becomes extremely important. Without it, data silos arise, causing discrepancies and variations between data points. It also calls into question the integrity of even wider swaths of data, along with the daily operations that depend on timely and reliable information. Without consistent and reliable data integration, departments fall out of sync, resulting in poor internal and external communications.

The antidote is accurate and complete data syncing across all CRMs, sales, and other analytics tools. Only then will marketing, sales, and customer success teams genuinely know their customers well enough to fully personalize communications and provide outstanding experiences. Efficiently synced data leads to higher customer satisfaction, repeat business, and, above all, revenue.

Unifying Tools

Businesses often feel pressured to choose between two subpar options:

1. Make everyone conform to a single CRM platform — at the cost of major departmental disruptions
2. Allow unrestrained numbers of platforms but waste time and money constantly bridging data silos

However, businesses now have a more lucrative third option: unify multiple CRM platforms seamlessly in the background using simple, automated data-integration tools.

Thanks to a pioneering no-code hub-and-spoke model, automatically integrating disparate CRM data is now a reality. It places developer-grade tools firmly in the hands of non-developers, creating minimal learning curves for IT admins and any staff member charged with customer-facing operations.

Rather than unifying data by sterilizing it with a strict, single-platform policy or forgoing data unification altogether, the right solution is a digital multi-tool that can be adapted to any number of formats. As revenue operations span departmental boundaries, it’s essential to smooth those boundaries whenever they arise.

Related: Navigating Customer Data Unification Through a Merger as a Revenue Leader

Who’s Your Data-Integration Partner?

The most valuable integration partner will bring company-wide CRMs together with clean, auto-compiled data. Only then can organizations consistently maintain a single source of truth: the information itself. This is raw, shareable data that speaks for itself, regardless of how it was acquired and unfettered with contextual interpretations — until, that is, a specific context is needed.

While each department may desire data cherry-picked for their needs, those needs change when data crosses departmental boundaries. Doing so requires data to become platform-agnostic to be exchanged freely, allowing each department to tailor-fit it to their needs from scratch.

It makes sense that each team will want to use data differently because they all have unique priorities. To effectively share their data, though, they must be able to return it to a central data pool (the “hub” in the hub-and-spoke model), where it becomes readily accessible organization-wide. It can then be re-uploaded into a new platform, where the data enters a new native environment that can modify and use it with whole new parameters.

From there, organizations can apply data from any source in countless ways on any platform. It’s an inherently creative process of finding a new use for CRM data — but some of the most effective solutions include:

• Informing the analytical models of multiple platforms using data from any source
• Improving sales personalization via marketing data (and vice versa)
• Identifying and nurturing the customers that need it most
• Eliminating data silos
• Increasing relevance of sales outreach efforts
• Targeting upsell and cross-sell automation techniques more accurately
• Approaching leads with the right team member at the right time
• Painting a broader but more accurate customer picture
• Generating more precise revenue impact reports

These benefits are all the more critical when considering that nearly half (48%) of CRM failure is attributable to a lack of a business strategy. When you can lower the boundaries between CRM, sales, and analytics platforms at will, the utility of every data point improves immeasurably.

Related: The Value of a Data Management Platform Integration

Greater Profits Through Improved Data Utility

Unsurprisingly, data-driven companies report an 8% increase in revenue and a 10% decrease in costs compared to others who lack this focus. Considering that these figures don’t qualify how that data is used, the benefits will undoubtedly be higher for those making concerted efforts to apply their data tactfully and strategically.

Applying data at the highest level requires overcoming the first challenge: syncing information multi-directionally easily and quickly (or, all the better, automatically). Ultimately, data synchronization, not the data itself, turns disparate data points into intelligent answers. Each department can then look at data and obtain the answers they need when needed—which is especially important for revenue teams.

Because RevOps teams must be capable of smoothing granular details while maintaining an eagle’s eye view of every department, they’re particularly impacted by the benefits of automated data-syncing. They can’t master the tools the departments they work with use daily, but they must still understand their role in the grand scheme.

It’s easier for them to see the utility, then, of a single tool that can quickly bridge the gaps between:

• CRM platforms
• Marketing Automation tools
• Sales Enablement apps
• Customer Success portals

Further, data synchronization plays heavily into data sanitization efforts because it’s required to integrate data across once-disparate platforms without introducing errors or redundant (let alone incorrect) data.

Clean, synchronized data can be applied multi-directionally, simultaneously fulfilling multiple needs across the organization. This keeps teams and systems (both procedurally and with software) in sync. The data speaks louder than the data containers because the staff knows it’s no longer an appendage of any given app or department.

Teams will also learn more about their data when seen through another department’s eyes — and other departments can intuitively understand the new information by uploading it into their native environment. In essence, everyone can speak the same “data language” once the data no longer requires interpretation.

As customer behaviors become more accurately represented by data regardless of where they originate, company operations can adapt more effectively and with little guesswork. Armed with no-code data-universalization tools, employees of any department can develop custom workflows informed by automatically synced custom fields or objects.

Wherever native integrations have left gaps in data or data relevance, it’s a sign that greater flexibility is needed in applying data across different CRMs. Only then can staff apply themselves accordingly, too, for the ultimate benefit of the customer.

Start Streamlining Customer Data

Companies at every scale have left no stone unturned in their quest for more customer insights and data-driven revenue growth. Now, they have no place left to turn their attention but to the data’s general role throughout their organization.

Determining the value of any data set must be done on a case-by-case basis. Yet, it’s clear that its value rises exponentially when it can be used without constraint by the platform it originated in.

This is now possible with Vertify’s all-in-one RevOps automation platform — designed to automate and synchronize multiple CRMs and bust data silos wide open (while still maintaining the highest level of data quality). Want to see everything Vertify can do for you? Request a demo now.