Dark clouds accompany sales and marketing teams. This is an evergreen challenge for small businesses to solve. But, no matter how hard you tackle, it impacts the customer journey, your revenue, and customer experience. But what causes it? And how might CRM be the answer?
What you will learn in this article
- The 6 causes of sales and marketing troubles
- The 5 benefits of CRM sales and marketing alignment
- How CRM automation can help you and your business
- What is smarketing
- How to get started with CRM
6 reasons your marketing and sales team are working under a cloud
- They work independently of each other. Consequently, both have no real context with which to work.
- They have a disjointed picture of the customer.
- The sales team continually disqualifies leads generated by the marketing team.
- The sales team struggles to convert the massive volume of leads sent by marketing.
- Each department uses different tools.
- They don’t share goals and strategies that are appropriately aligned.
However, this is changing as businesses, small and large, realize the benefits of unifying and aligning both teams.
5 benefits of aligning sales and marketing with CRM
The sales and marketing puzzle solution is increasingly Customer Relationship Marketing, even for small businesses who may not have considered it before. So what can CRM bring in terms of alignment?
Here are 5 top benefits you can enjoy.
Better targeting of customers
Usually, it’s the marketing team that’s responsible for creating customer personas. These are built from website data, social media monitoring, discussions with sales, research, case studies, and customer interviews.
However, it’s your sales team that has daily interactions with customers and prospects. Sales have a deep understanding of the pain points that matter to customers. For example, they know how clients feel about price points and which deals will close quickly. The marketing team can see which website pages a prospect or customer visits and their interests. This information helps marketing arrive at the ideal target audience.
By combining sales and marketing insights, you can better understand your target audience and create better personas.
Better lead qualification
Alignment of sales and marketing via CRM gives both teams access to customer and prospect data in a single location. Using the common platform offered by CRM, it is possible to nurture leads and quickly identify prospects ready to buy. As a result, this 360-degree view results in better-qualified leads, higher conversion rates, and less churn.
Faster prospect connections
One of the factors that significantly influence conversions is response time. A faster response when the prospect is hot will improve the possibility of conversion.
Using CRM to work together, the marketing team can send more qualified leads to the sales team faster. Quicker qualification means sales can reach out sooner. However, both teams need to share the same vision of the ideal customer profile to succeed.
Sharper focus on a common goal
Both marketing and sales need to realize they are on the same side. And shooting at the same goal. If you can get both teams to think as one, they will better understand the other’s objectives and processes. CRM’s unifying platform goes a long way in accomplishing this.
Better competitor intelligence
Your marketing team spends a lot of time researching the competition. Getting marketing to share this intel with sales is easier with CRM. In addition, it helps sales reps explain to prospects why your solution is better.
How CRM automation can help
One of the killer apps within CRM is the automation of marketing and other workflows. Automating tasks that are ‘admin’ will free up time for your marketing and sales team. This is precious time they can spend working with clients and prospects instead.
There are multiple benefits to be derived from automation. These include:
- Tracking of customers’ online behavior, which provides data-driven actionable insights
- Attracting prospects
- Nurturing and closing leads
The automation within CRM allows you to perform various tasks with no human intervention and speed up your sales funnel. There are, however, five stand-out benefits you should know about.
Automatic data logging – Every interaction is logged for future reference.
Reliable data capture – Prospect data is automatically recorded whenever they interact with your company.
Seamless communication – You can set up automated sequences to send emails at preset intervals.
Smooth lead management – You can automate lead assignments based on a set of rules or territory to reduce the time it would take to do manually. This improves lead response times and productivity.
AI insights – Artificial intelligence recognizes trends and patterns to generate actionable insights, such as if a contact appears ready to close a deal, etc.
What’s smarketing?
As irritating a term as it is, smarketing refers to keeping your marketing and sales team on the same page using CRM’s built-in marketing features.
Smarketing allows you to:
- Delight your customers
- Improve conversion rates
- Give your sales team full context of what marketing is doing and vice versa
- Provide a more customized experience for the customer
- Be consistent
- Ditch multiple tools
Smarketing consigns manual systems to the pages of history as it pulls all the tools you need into one integrated workspace.
How to get started with CRM
Small businesses can undeniably benefit from CRM. Not least in terms of aligning marketing and sales. By working together in unison, the inevitable results are happier customers and more sales.
However, many small businesses can feel slightly spooked by the concept of CRM. This, though, can be dispelled by trying before buying with a free trial. To save you time, small business owners are well-advised to limit their research to cloud-based CRM providers. This is because a cloud-based CRM solution is an affordable and cost-benefit efficient route into CRM.
Verdict
Sales and marketing are a duet. They have to work together perfectly and be in harmony. The best way to get your sales and marketing teams on the same song sheet is via CRM. Contact us today. We are the cloud CRM experts and fully attuned to the needs of small businesses.
