While many use their CRM email system as a general mailing list, two marketing executives say to keep separate lists when it comes to CRM and marketing.

An article on Chief Marketer spoke with both John Coe, president of Sales and Marketing Institute, and Jim Wheaton, co-founder of the Wheaton Group, about who it is essentially for business-to-business marketers to have a CRM email database system and a marketing database.

“People are beginning to realize the CRM system is not their database,” Coe told Chief Marketer. “It has a lot of data in it, and it supports sales, but it’s not a full-fledged operational system.”

Wheaton said a true marketing system should start at the account level and then look to the individual site and address before rolling all of that information up into the organizational umbrella level.

An article on StickyBranding.com said that a marketing database is your most important resource and should be treated as such.

“Basically a big database is a license to print money,” the website said. The site added that a customer database is hard to grow, hard to maintain and hard to duplicate, but it gives any business “an incredible competitive advantage.”