Did you hear the one about the guy who walked into the wellness store to stock up on natural supplements and bought so much, he threw his back out trying to carry it to his car? The lesson: Too much of a good thing can produce bad results—sometimes the opposite result of what its purpose is. A workplace example of that: productivity apps.
Software engineers have developed thousands of apps that promise to change our lives and make us more efficient at our jobs, and it’s easy to be tempted by all of the applications that are out there. Many companies use multiple marketing systems such as Constant Contact or MailChimp for email, Google Analytics for website reporting, HootSuite for social media, and NetSuite or Sugar as a CRM solution. But using all these apps creates more problems than they solve. While a marketer may save time on specific tasks, they lose time, marketing efficiency, and even money, managing and switching between various programs over the course of each day.
The problem with multiple marketing tools:
Software salespeople sell each marketing tool to answer a specific problem without looking at how they all integrate. Their job is to sell you a particular tool, not an integration package, and this causes several problems:
- Disconnected data: Your devices are not meant to integrate, and they don’t. Your systems do not communicate with each other. It is time-consuming to export data from one area and import it to another, whereas if the system were integrated, it would do so automatically. In a perfect world, you’d like to see your customer’s journey from contact to sale. By clicking on their name, you’d see what products they were interested in, what pages on your website they visited, and more. Without integration, you are losing valuable data.
- Loss of productivity: Essentially, instead of a complete picture, you’re left with an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. If you want to know what your data looks like, you have to stop all the tasks you’re doing to analyze and collate. You will spend hours aggregating and piecing together data.
- Maintaining multiple systems: Without an integrated approach, it will take time to keep each system up to date. Instead of updating altogether, each piece of software will need to upgrade separately, costing you time as you wait for the upload. Instead of your data automatically updating across all platforms, you will have to manually update data, combine it all in Excel, and reconcile reports. You will lose valuable time just managing your passwords and switching between tools.
- Difficult to set up conversion tracking: If you are in marketing or sales, conversion tracking is key to getting a complete idea of your prospect’s or customer’s behavior. From what they click on to what they order, every separate piece of data could be a piece in the larger puzzle of how to market specifically to them. Any paid search or social campaigns you have running will be almost impossible to keep track of with separate marketing tools.
- Cost of multiple software systems: Not only are you wasting money in time and data, but you are also losing money by paying for various software systems and not one complete package.
How Marketers and Salespeople Should Spend their Time:
If marketers could recapture their time, they’d spend it on their core competencies. Salespeople need time to funnel and close their sales. Marketers want to target their clients more closely. Tasks that impact revenue are the tasks you should be focused on, not switching between applications. In a study of over 2000 salespeople and marketers, this graph shows precisely what they’d like to spend their time on rather than managing multiple, scattered tools.
The Solution:
First, managers should review the tools they use, identify where time is lost, find redundancies, consolidate tools, and focus on integration. The ultimate goal should be to utilize an integrated set of tools that seamlessly drive sales and marketing.
At Brainstorm, we’re big fans of the HubSpot – an all-in-one platform that integrates marketing and sales functionality and helps companies grow better by attracting visitors, engaging leads and delighting customers. Talk to us and we’d be happy to look at your current processes and recommend how you might best consolidate your tools to improve marketing efficiency for your organization.