The CRM Toolkit: How to Make the Most of Your CRM for Marketing Success

3 min readOct 1, 2022

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When you’re talking about CRM, you probably aren’t thinking of your shiny new marketing tool. Instead, chances are you’re picturing your old inbox, littered with marketing emails that you never looked at again. Or maybe you’re picturing the software on the other side of the equation: a bunch of seemingly disconnected tools and processes that all need to be integrated in order to reach your full potential as a marketer. Although there is some truth to both of these things, they aren’t what makes a good CRM for marketing. Instead, a good CRM for marketing is an integrated toolkit that helps marketers take action at every stage of their customer lifecycle: from identifying opportunities and nurturing leads through to closing sales and monitoring results post-purchase. Here we will discuss how an integrated approach can help you make the most of your CRMLoaning

What is a good marketing CRM?

A good marketing tool is data-driven

CRMs are a great way to obtain and organize customer information, but they can’t provide any analytical insight without data. Your CRM should rely on data to help you reach your target customers and improve your marketing strategy. This can be anything from understanding your audience better, to identifying which marketing tactics are driving the most results.

An integrated toolkit includes the following features.

Customer personas — Understanding your customer to provide an accurate picture of who they are and their interests can help you better serve their needs
Lead scoring — With the right lead scoring strategy, you can identify prospects who are more likely to buy and prioritize their activities by slotting them into a sales funnel
Lead generation — Using tools like drip marketing and CRMs, you can better nurture leads and increase ROI with personalized messages.
Lead nurturing — By implementing a lead nurturing strategy, you can create more effective interactions with your customers and strengthen the relationship.
Sales funnel — By understanding your sales funnel and optimizing it, you can drive more customers through your funnel and increase your revenue.
Online sales tracking — By setting up metrics for your online sales, you can get more accurate insights into your business.

An actionable list of user behaviors

If you want to improve your CRM, you need to know what users are actually doing inside your CRM. Instead of just relying on reports, take the time to review your CRM to identify user behaviors. What activities are users performing inside your CRM? Are they creating new customers? What kind of customer information do they provide? Understanding these behaviors will give you a much better understanding of what is happening in your CRM and help you identify opportunities to improve.

A nurture and revenue strategy for every stage of the customer lifecycle

Successful marketing relies on an integrated strategy designed to bring new customers through to profitable ones. To improve your marketing CRM, you will need to set up a nurture and revenue strategy for every stage of your customer lifecycle. At the prospecting stage, you need to identify ways of finding potential customers and identifying their interests. This will help you understand your audience better, providing you with more accurate data for lead scoring and customer personas.

Wrapping up

Good marketing CRMs help you build stronger relationships with your customers, and more profitable sales funnels. When you have a good marketing CRM in place, you don’t have to rely on gut feelings or guesswork. With data-driven insights, you can measure how well your marketing is working and make sure that it’s as effective as possible.