8 Effective Ways CRM can Align Sales and Marketing

To retain existing customers and increase sales, alignment of sales and marketing in businesses becomes a key factor. The marketing team gets annoyed at the sales team for failing to follow up on leads and vice-versa later is annoyed with the former team for generating low-quality leads. You win when sales and marketing are working together for higher customer retention.

Unfortunately, the reality is opposite and uncertain as many companies have a poor record in the alignment of sales and marketing and they do not collaborate enough. Due to this to convert new customers and grow over the long-term, proves to be negatively impacted on the company’s ability. Several businesses struggle to identify and improve these flaws.
Let’s uncover the unique insights into aligning the process!

Grow your business and scale it beyond limits

To make sure that the business is growing to brand new heights and extract the most value from the customers and prospects, fully aligned and hybrid teams of sales and marketing put your organization in the best position.

How can a business be benefitted from CRM? How can CRM align sales and marketing? Finally, the best practices to improve the winning strategy comes from:

Sales + Marketing = SmartMarketing = “Smarketing”

This is how CRM can do Smarketing – 8 Ways

No matter how large or small they are, it is not uncommon to find a company, that’s dominated by either the sales or marketing team. However, it is rare to find a business thinking of the two functions as an equal integrated team and that’s dedicated to both sales and marketing.

Here are eight simple ways CRM can align sales and marketing:

1. Evaluate the tracked leads

To accelerate the sales process, evaluation of the leads will help you. The lead tracking software in online CRM helps you to get every lead detail in an online cloud-based CRM repository, which helps the company’s data to get organized and convert those leads into sales.

Thus, to align the sales strategy and work more efficiently, the lead tracking in the CRM software helps the sales team. Sales representative’s time and energy are also saved by CRM.

Therefore, the sales representative need not have to waste much time because he has to be more productive on closing the deal as soon as possible & has every required information about the lead.

2. ‘Marketing-first’ approach must be used

What successful business teams do differently, is that they take a ‘marketing first’ approach. Finding (or target) potential customers who have a specific problem and showing them how it can be solved, is the only means for marketers.

Sharing information on the product and selling the features and the benefits, by starting marketing them who nurture new leads and warm up.

Then, the sales team can step in to reinforce what the marketing team has said and close the deal when the lead is ready to make a decision and fully informed.

3. Marketing messages must be kept consistent

If sales and marketing are not aligned, then you’re not giving a good first impression of your company and, therefore, a prospect is less likely to trust you.

21% of B2B marketers cite ‘giving the customer a poor impression of our organization’ as one of the most detrimental factors resulting from poor content marketing and sales alignment.

4. Lead scoring can be implemented

Lead scoring allows marketers to accurately gauge when leads are qualified and ready to be passed over to sales for outreach. It is one of the major benefits that marketing automation solutions provider.

Getting the most sales-ready leads helps in prioritizing their outreach.

This is because lead scoring improves sales and marketing alignment, forces marketing and sales to work together more closely, and empowers both teams to achieve better results.

5. Leverage automated notifications

If marketing wants to notify sales about any action, they set up virtual notifications.

Marketing can set up automated notifications when specified actions take place with marketing automation solutions and integrated CRM.

The possibilities are endless, which is why leveraging automated notifications is a great marketing and sales alignment strategy.

6. Inbound Content can collaborate

The content market communicates with leads at each stage of the buyer’s journey so that they can produce inbound content to support sales.

Sales and Marketing collaborate on a few high-level content pieces to improve their alignment.

The sales team must think more in terms of pitching benefits than features to bring the two teams together and effectively.

7.  Customer feedback must be used

One must look at the feedback they get directly from their customer as this is one of the most powerful things that one can do for aligning sales and marketing teams together using CRM.

You can use these insights to pick out specific phrases to create new marketing messages, as well as refine your product or service offering.

At the same time, you can use this information to get a better understanding of what your customers like about your product.

8. Track joint KPIs

One thing you should consider when it comes to getting your sales and marketing departments in sync is measuring joint key performance indicators (KPIs).

The biggest challenge in aligning sales and marketing using CRM is that both teams are measured differently.

Also, you will be able to detect the weak areas in your customer acquisition funnel and fix not just parts of it, but the entire funnel.

What does a company get from this? ‘Your team is uniting under one common goal.’

EPILOGUE

What does aligning sales and marketing give? Helps them in boosting company revenue and reaching their goals.

Companies that focus on alignment using CRM for improved effectiveness are those companies that will outperform their competition.

The businesses that follow the tips above will come out on top like so much competition is saturating nearly every industry. Those that don’t make alignment using CRM a priority will fade into the background.