I have Lead Generation and Customer Relationship Management platforms, how is this different from Marketing Automation?
A lead generation platform focuses primarily on the collection and management of leads and the routing of those leads to different entities when they reach a certain scoring threshold. But where was the marketing campaign planned? What was the budget? Who worked on it and how efficient was the process? There are as many definition of CRM solutions as there are uses. At the core, CRM solutions focus on the customer data, insights and making the customer the center of your business. It is not until a lead becomes a customer that most CRM solutions begin to manage that individual or business.
Lead generation is one component of Marketing Automation and CRM provides Marketing Automation tools the customer data list that is used to drive upsell and cross-sell campaigns. These limited – yet important – roles of Lead Generation and CRM highlight the difference between full marketing automation. Neither Lead Generation or CRM fully address the online and offline activities involved in project management, resource management, campaign management, cross-channel reporting that a full Marketing Automation solution provides. Marketing Automation is about leveraging the capabilities of these two tools, but at the same time adding the planning, budgeting, resource management and reporting across all channels and functions.
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