The Case for Integrating CRM and Marketing Automation (Video)

X2CRM CEO David Buchanan explains why CRM and marketing automation systems should be integrated rather than siloed in this clip from CRM evolution 2018.

David Buchanan: Marketing automation and CRM have to be applications that are designed together. The reason for this is that the databases between CRM and marketing automation share about 70 percent of the data. Both databases have leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities, and these are different table names with different field names, and actually different philosophies. ParEx stores prospects a little differently than Marketing Valdez, which is a little differently than Salesforce. So, you kind of have to try and match those things up when you're doing an implementation, if they're different and separate products.

And then also, you need reports that go across those two functional areas. If they're in different databases, it's really hard to get those reports out. And actually, if they're in separate tools, like it is with Salesforce, you have to do a customization twice. Whereas with us, just one set of tables support both the CRM and the marketing automation application.

Also, if you have multiple tools, even your admin's going to be a multi-step process. You have to define the user to multiple admin tools, between the marketing automation and your CRM.

So, I think there's a lot of reasons this has to happen. The market hasn't adapted to that yet. We think there's a big opening in the enterprise layer of the market for a company that really has marketing automation and CRM and it's one unified application.

So, here's the example. On the left here is X2CRM. We have marketing and CRM together. They're written in a common language, most of it's written in PHP, we have some Javascript on the front end. We have an open database, we use open source MySQL database. Also, that's the same database that Amazon now sells as the Aurora Database Server. I don't know if you all are familiar with the Amazon Web Services, but a huge difference between Salesforce and us is that Salesforce had to write their own cloud structure, in 1999 when they started, there was not a cloud structure available.

Well, we can do well with Amazon AWS. And they have now taken the award database serve which is a version of MySQL and they offer that as a database server. So, we can just spin up a new server for somebody literally in a half hour and put their database away. It gives total control and flexibility to the customer. Then we run on top of Amazon's elastic computing environment, which means that, you can set it up, for example during the holiday season, you can have your service just automatically dynamically increase and then drop back off. So you have total control of this. Whereas in the older legacy systems, Salesforce is the only one that controls that deployment and you're whole application and database are linked in with other customers in actually the same files.

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