How Well-Aligned Sales and Marketing Teams Can Increase Your Revenue (And How a CRM Helps You Do That)

“It is not your customers’ job to remember you. It is your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don’t have the chance to forget you.” Patricia Fripp

How do you do that? By ensuring that your marketing and sales teams work as a single unit to achieve a common goal.

About 74% of successful organizations have a well-aligned sales and marketing team

Traditionally, sales and marketing teams have worked in silos, creating a wide communication gap during interaction with customers. Marketing worked on enhancing the buyer’s journey while sales chased leads and nurtured them.

But customer expectations are only increasing everyday, demanding a more nuanced, consolidated approach to craft a rich, end-to-end experience.

According to Marketo, the alignment between sales and marketing is crucial to boost business performance in the present times. When sales and marketing teams unite their efforts, they help in improving marketing ROI dramatically, along with an increase in sales productivity. More importantly, they drive top-line growth.

What do we mean by alignment?

Alignment can mean numerous things including

• Development of common definitions
• Common metrics as well as goals
• Lead management, evaluation, and nurturing methods
• Employment of streamlined processes

So, how can you bring the sales and marketing teams on the same page?

Increasing collaboration and profitability can both be achieved by taking advantage of the right CRM and its strong features. Let’s take a quick look.

Improved communication and updates

Having a CRM software ensures greater efficiency and better communication and updates within the teams. Sales and marketing teams both have access to contacts and all the associated information, which helps streamline messaging, to remain updated and avoid miscommunications. With the help of CRMs, managers can create in-depth contact profiles and reports for more effective outreach. It also helps you to manage and analyze customer interactions throughout the sales and marketing lifecycle for a sharper, 360-degree understanding of your audience.

Enhanced lead nurturing and quality

Marketing and sales teams have different skill sets but share similar goals. With a customized CRM, they can collaborate to define sales and lead generation, along with scoring strategies. Connecting marketing automation tools to your CRM helps in creating interdepartmental bridges to work in tandem with sales teams to minimize bottlenecks, cut costs, and generate ideas. It also helps in vetting and assessing leads together for proper segmentation and targeted focus.

Better customer insights

Enabling predictive analytics in the CRM allows marketing and sales teams to gain access to deeper customer insights. Real-time and historical data reports and performance analytics can be leveraged to define activities, follow leads, and shape future campaigns in a coordinated manner allowing for more personalization.

Integrate automation tools

CRMs offer all the benefits of automation, which helps marketing and sales teams to be on the same page. Incorporating sales, marketing, and service automation tools help smoothen different aspects of the business. For instance, marketing automation helps queue up email drip campaigns and welcome emails. Sales automation helps with call scheduling, adding chatbots, customer self-service options, and smoother pipeline stage transitions. Having a well-configured CRM can enable teams to intersect their tasks and goals for a smoother customer journey.

Take the ABM approach

A recent global survey from HubSpot shows that 70% of marketers are now using ABM, which is 15% higher than the number in 2020.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) takes an exhaustive approach to account selection, customer retention, and lead management to help organizations overcome the challenges they face. ABM is a business strategy that requires marketing and sales teams to work together on a select group of key accounts. ABM campaigns utilize data and bundle sales strategies with marketing automation to create personal, targeted campaigns for the selected accounts. In this way, it fosters higher engagement throughout the buyer journey beginning from the time a lead is converted all the way up to when the customer makes a purchase.

ABM is about “discovering and engaging the active buyer. Being able to discover the prospective buyer and engage them across channels and score them by activity – that all plays to the strengths of ABM.” – Andre Yee, CEO, Triblio

With the above processes in place, organizations can foster better understanding between the two teams, spurring a significant increase in customer growth and the bottom line.

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