B2B Marketing University: For Now, Marketing Automation and CRM Are Still Separate

Summary: Marketing automation and CRM systems may eventually converge, but for now marketers need help explaining why they need a system of their own.

I hugely enjoyed yesterday’s Boston session of the Silverpop-sponsored B2B Marketing University. (You can catch another session in Atlanta next week and in Seattle on December 1.) I won’t try to recap four hours of insights from Adam Needles from Silverpop, Carlos Hidalgo of Annuitas Group and Joe Moloney of Conselltants (no Web site, it seems), as well as Yours Truly. But there were a couple of topics that caught my fancy:

1. People still don’t understand the difference between marketing automation vs. CRM.

I really thought the distinction was pretty clear by now, but the question came up more than once. My own answer boiled down to a perhaps-not-convincing “trust me, they’re really different”, although I’ve addressed the question in depth in the resources section of the Raab Guide Web site.

Joe Moloney gave a more detailed answer about limits in Salesforce.com in particular, including lack of CAN-SPAM compliance and limits on mass emails. Someone (I think it was end-of-day panelist Meg Heuer of Sirius Decisions) also pointed out that CRM data is often very dirty, which isn't a problem for salespeople working with one record at a time, but making it hard to use for marketing.

The immediate take-away here is that the industry still needs to educate prospective buyers on why marketers need a separate system. Vendors take note.

2. Will Marketing automation and CRM remain separate?

The discussion also segued into whether marketing automation and CRM will merge in the long run. I still suspect they will, driven by the need for ever-closer cooperation between marketing and sales teams in managing prospect relationships. But the other presenters disagreed, largely arguing that the separate groups have distinct needs. (See Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf? Is Salesforce.com a threat to vendors of marketing automation solutions? by Market2Lead CMO Kevin Joyce for a good statement of the separatist position.)

Part of the reason I expect convergence to happen is that it’s already taking place. (The past is so much easier to predict than the future.) The movement is coming mostly from the marketing automation side, presumably because there is more money to gain by moving into sales from marketing systems than vice versa:

- marketing automation systems for small businesses (Infusionsoft, Office Autopilot, Net-Results, etc.) typically include a CRM option for clients who don’t want to pay for a separate Salesforce.com or other license.

- firms aimed at larger installations (Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Genius.com, Active Conversion) are providing widgets that give sales people direct access to marketing automation information.

3. Technology may impede Software-as-a-Service sales automation vendors from adding marketing automation.

As Joe Moloney was listing the limits that Salesforce.com places on mass access to client data, I recalled that these are in place fundamentally to avoid large analytical queries that could slow down response for all other users of the shared systems. This isn’t an inherent problem with Software-as-a-Service itself: remember, the B2B marketing automation vendors themselves all operate on a SaaS model, and there is a growing number of SaaS business intelligence systems too.

But even though modern database technology allows one system to handle both CRM transactions and analytical marketing queries, this does take an appropriate design. I strongly suspect that existing SaaS CRM vendors like Salesforce.com would need to fundamentally rearchitect their systems to support serious marketing automation processing, especially for clients with millions of contact records. This may impede them from adding marketing automation capabilities, although newer SaaS CRM systems could emerge that are designed from the start to do both.

From this perspective, another reason combined marketing automation/CRM systems are first being offered to small companies may be that it’s easier to provide good performance for both applications when volumes are small.

Yesterday also triggered another set of thoughts regarding the importance of marketing content. But since one of these was the need to keep materials short, I’ll put them into a separate post.