three distinct differences between CRM & Marketing Automation.

CRM & Marketing Automation are both integral and you need both in order to have a successful marketing campaign. Many CRM systems I have come up against suggest that their platforms are capable of a variety of marketing automation, BEWARE this is highly overstated without syncing to a CRM system, marketing automation should be cautiously adopted when dealing with B2B generation purposes.

So what is needed in order to implement a marketing strategy lets first take a look at CRM V's Marketing automation.

-CRM: Aggregating knowledge about existing customer accounts and new customer pipelines.
-Marketing Automation: Mainly focused on the one-to-one communication with early stage prospects.

-CRM: Is more focused on sales, account management and services. (This is what your sales team would focus on).
-Marketing Automation: Exclusively focuses on marketing team and on the front end of demand generation. 

-CRM: Is more of a database but does allow some actions to be carried out. i.e. account management functions. 
-Marketing Automation: This is the execution platform you would use, as it stores a prospects tracking/behavior patterns that can then be used to send incentives and emails to nurture customers.  

If you have any questions, or would like to see more of these then please contact me at sarah.talbot@copernica.com or visit our website www.copernica.com for more information.