In every industry, we always hear this conversation.
“Sales: It was a marketing fault. We didn’t receive proper leads.
Marketing: Sales didn’t convert those potential leads.”
It is a never-ending conflict between the marketing and sales department. But such conflicts lead to a lot of losses to the company. It is necessary to employ such tools or software that can align and synergize both the department.
That can be done with the help of the CRM system. It can avail a lot of benefits like:
Enhance communication
The prime distractors of marketers and sales team are wasteful meetings and excessive emails. Data suggests that for every two marketers out of five, lack communication or cause miscommunication which leads to the most common interdepartmental conflict.
With sales and marketing automation software, both the teams can enjoy greater efficiency. A CRM tool helps managers to generate focused tracking reports and extensive contact records.
It can also aid the business to keep a better track of the effectiveness of the strategies created by the marketing or sales team.
Avail deeper and better insights
Getting access to information on sales opportunities, marketing trends, and forecasts are essential in crafting the company’s immediate and long-term action plans.
With the help of CRM system, both the teams can identify which markets and products are the most profitable, and evaluate how to adjust strategy to reach their goals.
Share goals and expectations
Sales and marketing team can unite together to define the goals like lead generation, sales nurturing and scoring strategies, successful organizations which create bridges between strictly differentiated departments.
Instead of working for different goals with unclear expectations of one another, the teams with the help of customer relationship management software can begin to work together to generate ideas, reduce bottlenecks and inform the business’s understanding of its customer base.
Avoid duplicated efforts
With the automation benefits, both marketing and sales see the same picture of where each visitor, prospect, marketing or sales qualified lead stand in the buyer’s journey.
It is beneficial to tailor the marketing content efforts while enabling sales to better focus on outreach programs to lure customers.
A sales and marketing automation software can elevate lead to sales conversion rates and benefit sales teams to close deals and spot new opportunities.
Propelled with real-time data and a streamlined process, the business with such tools at their disposal can align its sales and marketing teams will prove more agility and effectiveness.
Here is a case study of Apple and how they use the CRM to avail the sweet benefits.
By far the most crucial focus of CRM is to improve the customer service experience for new and existing customers. The Apple Genius process is part of the tech support which focuses on allowing customers to meet face-to-face with technicians and discuss problems and solutions in depth.
Customer relationship management manages the effect of face-to-face contact and also enhance brand awareness when focusing on CRM-based advertising and targeted emails in the future.
By using CRM so massively in its retail structure, Apple has expertly produced a lifestyle experience rather than merely a purchase.
Apple is a multinational company which has had success in some different fields and needs software which can help them to reach customers on a face-to-face level. Small businesses can also receive benefit from this type of interpersonal CRM.
This case study shows that CRM does play an essential role during the operations of marketing, sales, and even customer experience.
Nurture leads to opportunities
Once a marketing team receives a lead, certain additional steps are essential before handoff to a sales team. Many times, the sales team are frustrated as they receive leads that are not nurtured or vetted.
By incorporating such tools, leads can be assessed, nurtured, and segmented.
Refine lead quality
Tech-savvy digital marketers focus on lead generation will use marketing automation, progressive profiling, and lead scoring to improve their data gathering and assessment efforts.
Without doing so, sales teams may consider leads to be lower quality and may fall through the cracks.
Marketing and sales enablement teams need to enhance data gathering efforts by constantly updating web forms, chat tools, and lead enrichment efforts to get better insights on leads.
Gain upsell opportunities and increase deal sizes
A CRM system can give sales teams more data that can be beneficial in evaluating, pitching, and supporting sales leads. The user can also find useful information about their interests, pain points, challenges, goals, company size, and buying authority.
The use of marketing automation also provides continuous data about potential customers and their interests over time. Such data can be used throughout the sales process to pitch accurate clients and customers.
By acquiring such refined data on a lead, both marketing and sales teams will be able to make better decisions with the leads in their system.
Moreover, they can also evaluate and forecast the future of the company by plotting data points like yearly company revenue, role/title of the contact, pain points, solutions and interests, and decision-making stage.
Formulate strategy and prospecting
CRM software can bridge the gap between marketing and sales which leads to improved lead quality, better nurturing efforts, and streamlined management of leads.
Sharing insights between marketing and sales teams can directly improve the audience targeting. When the marketing efforts are carried out by considering sales interactions, then marketers could use those insights to target the right buyers with the right value proposition.
Furthermore, some tools and techniques can help to integrate marketing and sales department.
If you are a budding business, then you can avail small business software benefits like:
- Improve lead quality
- Increase overall deal values
- Identify the best leads worth additional attention
- Improve upsell opportunities
- Improve lead generation results
- Build a more streamlined and efficient process
- Set shared expectations and foster better communication
Bottom line
Not only CRM brings both the team close together but also helps the big and small business to maintain cash flow management which can be easily done by with the help of data sharing as opposed to creating data silos within departments or competing.
Small businesses are incorporating CRMs which streamline their processes, optimize the need for extra workforce and help build loyal relationships with customers.
Author Bio:
My name is Ellen Koehler. My personal interest is towards compassionate blogging for small business to share the knowledge I have regarding business upliftment.
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