Are you aware that aligning sales and marketing draws the potential to drastically boost the performance of your business? Although marketing and sales teams most often do not agree to this, nevertheless when both of them work towards a common lead generation goal, companies typically see more than 38% greater sales win rates.
And there are no effective means to align sales and marketing than by adopting easy to use CRM software for lead generation, management and nurturing of the leads.
Therefore, here are a few ways your business can better align sales and marketing through a CRM software platform:
Build a Strategy Together
In general sales and marketing teams do not always see eye-to-eye, for one obvious reason, as both these teams have different goals.
This is because, while marketing has a much larger scope, concentrating on growing marketing, retaining customers, introducing new products and most importantly bring in qualified leads, the sales department, on the other hand, is solely focused around working with their sales pipeline.
Hence, to make sure that both sales and marketing teams are on the same page when it comes to generating and then qualifying and converting leads, we recommend implementing an SLA (Service Level Agreement).
What is a Service Level Agreement?
Well, in a layman’s term SLA is essentially a contract that highlights the conditions and terms of which one party has condescended to provide another.
While Service Level Agreements have been traditionally utilized for customer-related activities, in modern times it even plays an important role internally across all the departments in any organization.
According to a survey done 2017 by a global research firm, it suggested that businesses with a proactive SLA process are 34 percent more likely to find greater Return on Investments made (Year-over-Year).
Therefore, an SLA between marketing and sales would similarly highlight each department’s agreed-upon commitments to each other.
This is because SLA between these two teams not only allows them to hold each other accountable, but it even serves as a critical component for communication and interaction that educates the marketing and sales departments of one another’s responsibilities, roles, targets, and processes.
When developing your SLA for marketing and sales, here is a list of items you need to focus on that include:
Now, once you have implemented the SLA we are sure you should very soon see consistency on how leads are created and working in your easy to use CRM, which is enough evidence to prove that the reports across both these teams align and they are working towards a common goal.
Streamline Interdepartmental Communications
According to a research study by PandaDoc, it states that:
“51 percent of marketers are not satisfied with the level of communication between the teams and 53 percent of sales professionals are not pleased with their marketing’s support.”
Hence communication is one of the biggest hurdles that boost conflicts among departments in any workplace.
Therefore, if you are a small business or a startup on the rise, implementing best small business CRM software aids in minimizing conflicts as it helps in centralizing information in the CRM database , making it easy for all in the organization to access updated sales pipeline data and communication history about leads, prospects, and customers in one place.
This is because marketing and sales teams meet frequently to analyze performance reports which are often pulled directly from their easy to use CRM software.
Potential reports for building dashboards or the frequently shared KPI reports that are built for performance analysis might include:
Top of funnel reports: Total monthly (Marketing Qualified Leads) MQL, and (Sales Qualified Leads)
Middle of funnel reports: Marketing generated opportunities by stage
Bottom of funnel reports: Sales generated by individual lead source
But how does this streamlines interdepartmental communications?
Well, by knowing and understanding what and when a prospect has last talked along with the context of the conversation, both sales, and marketing departments can work more productively.
It not only keeps your sales reps from having overlapping outreach but it also aids marketing to communicate with the prospects knowing where the interactions left off and so what type of content might be suitable to the prospects in their buyer’s journey, which has according to certain stats delivered 73 percent enhanced conversion rates.
Improve Quality Of The Leads
While there are several ways by which brands can improve the quality of their leads, nevertheless if you are using an easy to use CRM software solution for your business implementing lead scoring for your marketing and sales teams is one of the most effective options for boosting the quality of your leads.
You can also use marketing automation in your easy to use CRM for optimizing lead distribution among the marketers in your team and also connect these two technologies for your teams to assess, vet, nurture and segment leads before they are passed to the sales teams.
Lead scoring helps your marketing teams to prioritize on the hottest leads and reduce considerable time which is wasted on unengaged prospects providing sales reps more time to concentrate who are likely to convert most quickly.
When building out your lead scoring formula, teams should evaluate items like:
Finally- Enhance your Personalized Outreach
Last but most importantly personalize every single communication that goes out both from your marketing and sales teams.
Using all-in-one CRM software that provides a 360-degree view of your leads, prospects and the customer’s history with your brand allows you staffs to get really smart with their communications.
Therefore, use an easy to use CRM that helps in mapping certain fields in your best small business CRM software (like lead source and others) which can enable your sales reps to get personal with their follow-up strategies that are more relevant to the leads for becoming your customers and thereby help sales to make quick wins.
