Last updated: October 25th, 2022
Before starting Outfunnel, I worked at a well-known CRM vendor. Our customers loved the product but one thing that kept coming up in customer feedback was the lack of good marketing integrations. For companies where sales and marketing needed to work together, there simply was no workable way to connect email marketing with the data stored in the CRM.
This puzzled me because this CRM had integrations available with big marketing players like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Drip, and many others.
I then decided to use these integrations and came to understand this frustration a lot better. The integrations were super lightweight. One of them just let you manually export a list from one tool to another. If you had new people added to that segment the next day, you needed to manually repeat the process. Every. Single. Time.
Alas, this wasn’t an exception. Having worked with various sales and marketing integrations for nearly 10 years on both sides, I’ve come to know that first-party integrations are limited by design. Not purposefully made to disappoint, of course, but limited by the way companies operate.
Where we are today: more tools, more data, but limited integration
More than 60% of marketers use 20+ marketing tools on a regular basis according to Airtable. At the same time, according to Mulesoft, only 28% of tools a company uses are integrated with other tools. More tools, more data, but limited integration—can you spot the issue here?
The main implication for sales and marketing leaders: integrations are more important than ever.
Nearly half of sales and marketing leaders claim that the tools would be more useful if they could be easily integrated, according to our research. Ease of integration is often the one key thing holding users back from getting the most from their tech stack.
How should sales and marketing tools be connected in a multi-app world?
We speak to dozens of companies each week and have learned what the two biggest needs are for businesses that use multiple sales and marketing tools in parallel. For example, HubSpot as their CRM, ActiveCampaign as their email marketing tool, and a WordPress website.
First, they need to get their customer lists synced up across the different tools in a way where at least one of the tools has the full context about leads. Most companies expect the latter to be available in their CRM, the tool where things like previous interactions with marketing emails or web pages would be available for salespeople.
Secondly, they want to execute workflows across all the apps they use. For example:
- When a lead visits the pricing page, update the lead score and schedule a follow-up activity for the right salesperson.
- When someone becomes a paying customer, add them to a welcome email sequence, and remove them from the leads newsletter.
- When someone fills a quote request on the website, sync the submitted data to the CRM + open an Opportunity/Deal.
- When a Deal is marked as “Lost” in the CRM with a reason such as “Not now”, add the contact to a lead nurturing list.
- When someone clicks on marketing emails and browses certain pages on the website, record these in the CRM.
This is all relatively easy when you’re using a big (and pricey) platform such as HubSpot. But if not, building workflows like this are near-impossible.
Almost all native integrations are too lightweight. And while universal app connectors like Zapier and Automate.io are great for setting up light connections quickly, more sophisticated use cases can get complex and pricey very quickly.
The solution? Deep data integration + workflows across all your sales and marketing tools
There’s a new category of tools emerging that give you the benefits and insights of an integrated suite while using best-of-breed tools. Tools like Outfunnel can connect sales and marketing workflows deeply and easily.
- Sync sales and marketing data between tools in a secure and hassle-free way
- See what leads do on your website with our web visitor tracking software
- Develop complete (360-degree) contact profiles with website behavior, email engagements, lead source information, and more
- Segment and score leads based on cross-platform contact and engagement data
- Trigger workflow and marketing automation based on segmentation and lead scores
Our vision is to bring sales and marketing closer together, at least when it comes to tools and data. To allow small businesses to manage and practice revenue marketing. Fortune5000 can already do this today, spending a small fortune on it. But every small business can and should benefit from marketing tools talking to sales tools.
Pick and mix your favorite sales and marketing tools, and Outfunnel will give your stack the “all-in-one” feel, without the “all-in-one” price tag.
Outfunnel already works with modern CRMs like Pipedrive, Copper, HubSpot, and Salesforce as well as marketing tools like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, Wix, Facebook Lead Forms, Elementor, and many more. See the full list of CRMs and marketing tools Outfunnel works with here.
If we do our job well, Outfunnel will help you outsmart and outsell the competition.
Questions?
