Top 5 Benefits of Sugar for Marketing

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Rankings season is upon us with March Madness right around the corner. It’s been another year of mediocracy for my UCLA Bruin squad, but at least I got to see some great wins in Pauley Pavilion this season for a mere $5 ticket price.

Whether you’re a blue blood fan or a Loyola-Chicago type fan, March Madness is without a doubt the greatest organized sports event of all time.

If you do a bit of research there are a lot of data scientist and sports gamblers out there who claim to have a system when it comes to helping you fill out your brackets. I’ve spent a good deal of wasted time looking at some of these sites only to come to the same conclusion every year: they don’t work.

Just throw some darts at your bracket, pick some 1 and 2 seeds and you’ll never be too disappointed.

When it comes to using Sugar from the Marketers perspective, it can be a very powerful tool, and I wanted to share with you my ranking of the Top 5 Benefits of Sugar for Marketing (connection made…finally.) Mind you, these are proven benefits, these aren’t theories and suggestions based on statistics – these are based on my use of Sugar!

Here are my top 5 marketing benefits of using Sugar ranked from 5 to 1.

#5 – Moving Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Qualified Leads

Sugar’s Lead Management and process automation drives higher lead-conversion and creates more “sales-ready” leads. From landing pages, to contact forms to email click-throughs, Sugar ensures every lead is captured and routed to the right team or individual while providing full end-to-end tracking.

Business development reps can manage their leads more efficiently with activity management and follow-ups. They can accelerate their follow-up call preparation times using Hint, providing them with all the customer contact and social network information with just a name and an email.

#4 – Accurately Measure ROI

Marketers need to know which specific campaigns are contributing to what leads, customers or dollars in your sales team’s pipeline. Sugar makes it easy to tie campaign history back to each opportunity, account, lead, and contact so you can identify the performance of all of your marketing initiatives, even if they are being run in another system.

#3 – Bringing Sales and Marketing Teams Together

Sugar can eliminate silos between your marketing and sales teams. As a marketer, you can define lead management and routing processes that work the way you do. Create rules to determine if leads should be routed to business development teams, directly to sales reps, or sent back for additional nurturing by marketing. Integrate Sugar to your existing marketing automation tools to tackle scoring, automation programs and drip campaigns with two-way data synchronization. (More on this later).

Sales teams can be alerted to hot leads based on behavior-dependent scores to help them focus on the most purchase-ready leads. With visibility into lead activity history (website visits, downloads and more), Sugar helps sellers reinforce key marketing messages and be better prepared for first conversations with potential clients.

#2 – Lead Tracking

With Sugar’s marketing CRM software, marketers have the ability to track and expose multichannel, multicampaign touches across each lead to give your teams clear visibility into what marketing efforts, interests and activities have caught their attention. These can be used to segment, score and track lead qualification metrics to help uncover who is truly ready to be handed off to sales versus who requires more nurturing.

#1 – The Ability to Integrate with Marketing Automation

One of the most important criteria for sales and marketing success is the alignment of the two teams. To facilitate the alignment, it is essential to integrate marketing automation with Sugar, which is why I gave it a personal rank with more detail.

Integrating your CRM with a marketing automation platform has become the status quo.

An Integrated CRM and Marketing Automation Solution does the following:

• Creates a two-way sync with your MA platform and Sugar, ensuring that the data your sales and marketing teams are working with is always correct.
• Provides sales with visibility to marketing activities and templates to send trackable emails to leads and contacts.
• Sends automated alerts and creates tasks in Sugar so sales can follow up based on a contact’s activity.
• Blends marketing and sales actions with intelligent and automated nurtures to decrease funnel leakage.
• Prioritizes and manages to follow up with advanced lead scoring and management features.
• Tracks a lead through the complete sales cycle from creation to close with reporting and dashboards.
• And much more…

Conclusion

Sugar helps marketing understand your customers like never before through more relevant, timely outreach and more actionable insights. You can create engaging campaigns, optimize future marketing efforts and ultimately gain a powerful understanding of the ROI of your marketing spend.

As a universal CRM Marketing tool, these five benefits are what makes using Sugar such a pleasure.  When Sugar is used properly by the marketing department, it provides you with an organizational structure that advances the sales and marketing team with the greatest opportunity to succeed.  After all, sales and marketing alignment never hurt anyone, did it?

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