Top 5 hacks to Automate Sales and Marketing with CRM

Discussing about Automate Sales and Marketing with CRM, alignment in sales and marketing departments in any organization can mean many things. It signifies developing shared goals, creating common definitions and metrics, lead management, combined lead nurturing, and lead evaluation efforts, which can be created by implementing CRM or customer relationship management for business with varied goals. “Alignment between Marketing and Sales is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. When marketing and sales teams unite around a single revenue cycle, they dramatically improve marketing ROI, sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line growth.”

Discussing about Automating Sales and Marketing with CRM, alignment in sales and marketing departments in any organization can mean many things. It signifies developing shared goals, creating common definitions and metrics, lead management, combined lead nurturing, and lead evaluation efforts, which can be created by implementing CRM or customer relationship management for business with varied goals.

According to Marketo:

“Alignment between Marketing and Sales is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. When marketing and sales teams unite around a single revenue cycle, they dramatically improve marketing ROI, sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line growth.”

Automate Sales and Marketing with CRM

A CRM helps companies analyze and manage customer communications all through the lifecycle of the customers to enhance the relationship, nurture sales, convert leads, and assist in customer retention over time.

79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. Click To Tweet

However, how does a Customer Relationship Management for business help align marketing and sales in an organization?

Here are just a few alignments opportunities for automating and synchronizing sales and marketing with CRM to increase your ROI:

Improve communication

According to Workfront’s State of Marketing Work Management 2015 report, excessive interdepartmental emails and wasteful meetings between your sales and marketing teams are two major distracters for marketers. Furthermore, for every two among five marketers, the dearth of communication or even at times miscommunication is one of the most common reasons for interdepartmental conflicts.

With Customer Relationship Management for business software, which is also shared-work-management software, both sales and marketing team members can enjoy superior efficiency. A CRM system aids managers generate focused tracking reports that help businesses to better track what sales and marketing tactics are most effective for your organization.

Shared Goals and Expectations

With your marketing and sales teams collaborating to define the sales generation, lead scoring, sales and lead nurturing strategies, successful organizations that depend on software for customer relationship management for business create bridges between both the teams. This way, instead of on working on dissimilar goals with blurred expectations of one another, CRM help teams to work together by generating common ideas, which reduces bottlenecks and help business managers understand the requirements of their customer base.

Avoid Duplicated Efforts

With the automation benefits of software that deals in customer relationship management for business, CRM software helps both marketing and sales see the same picture of where each prospect, visitors, sales, and marketing qualified leads stands in the buyer’s journey. This aids the marketing department to tailor contents and generate automated email campaigns while enabling sales to better focus outreach to all the interested customers.

Nurture Leads to Opportunities.

According to MarketingSherpa, “79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.”

Therefore, it is mandatory that once a lead is acquired, there should be additional steps which are needed to be taken before marketing handoff leads to the sales team. It is a common phenomenon, whereby most sales team members often get frustrated once they receive leads that have not been nurtured or vetted. However, by connecting marketing automation software to a platform which helps customer relationship management for a business like CRM systems, leads can be easily nurtured, assessed and segmented before passing them off to the sales teams.

Improve Lead Quality

Software that deals in Customer Relationship Management for business also help savvy digital marketers to focus on lead generation by using marketing automation tools, lead scoring and progressive profiling techniques to improve their information gathering and assessment efforts. Since, without doing so, sales team members of your organization may perceive leads to be of a lower quality whereby leads can fall through the crack. The data gathered by the marketing and sales enablement teams using updated web forms, chat tools, and other lead enrichment strategies help to get better insights on the leads.

lead capture

Takeaway

Here is a list of benefits that software for customer relationship management for business can help in aligning your marketing with sales in your organization for increasing your company’s bottom-line and ROI:

  • Improve lead quality
  • Identify the best leads worth additional attention
  • Improve upsell opportunities
  • Increase overall deal values
  • Set shared expectations and foster better communication
  • Improve lead generation results
  • Build a more streamlined and efficient process

If you liked this article, do let us know of your ideas and suggestions in the comment box below.

3 Types Of Emails Which You Should Automate with Your CRM

Email automation is the perfect way to educate and move your leads, prospects, and customers through your sales funnel, with further wasting any more time. In a recent study done on sales, it shows that sales reps spend more than half of their time at the office doing administrative CRM works and another 29% of their time searching and creating contents to pitch their products and services, which eventually leaves them with just one-third time for actually building a relationship and achieving winning businesses.

Chances are there that your sales team actually spends less time than they should spend for selling your products and services. In a recent study done on sales, it shows that sales reps spend more than half of their time at the office doing administrative CRM works and another 29% of their time searching and creating contents to pitch their products and services, which eventually leaves them with just one-third time for actually building a relationship and achieving winning businesses.

Now, to ensure that your sales team can utilize more of their time in closing deals, it is important that you must leverage your Customer Relationship Management system. You should understand that CRM is just not the software used for tracking and managing relationships, but it is also an extra pair of hands in your office for all those things (apart from selling) that your sales need, but should not have to do once they implement a CRM platform.

One of the best CRM tools that fall in this category is email automation. Automating emails shaves down the prolonged numbers of hours that your reps would have otherwise spent on customizing emails and remembering to send them on time.
Here are three most important email campaigns that you can automate with a CRM to keep your customers engaged without even bothering for your constant manual efforts:

1. Welcome Emails

Welcome emails are meant for new subscribers and lead to introduce them to your brand. Creating and automating welcome emails can generate substantial ROI, as studies have proved that welcome emails are viewed three times more by subscribers than other subsequent promotional emails. Moreover welcome emails help in educating your prospects and are likely to weed out any non-interested parties through the unsubscribe link.

These are few points you should remember while sending your welcome emails:

  • Introduce prospects and leads to your brand’s products and services
  • Prepare your prospects and leads into buying your products or services
  • Encourage your leads and prospects to connect with your brand through other channels and opportunities
  • Provide your leads and prospects with basic incentives to buy your products or services

2. Lead Nurturing Emails

Lead nurturing with emails can be really tricky. For without an organized process, it is easy to find opportunities slipping through the cracks that can eventually inundate your leads with too little or too much communication from your side. Therefore, automate your lead nurturing process through email campaigns without putting too much pressure on your leads.

Here are certain things you can do in your lead nurturing emails:

  • Educate your leads and prospects what your brand is capable of doing for them
  • Tell them a story about your brand and what sets your products and services apart from the competition
  • Occasionally, refer leads to your website or special landing pages for availing seasonal discounts and offers

3. Customer retention Emails

According to a study done by Forrester Research, it has been found that existing customers spend 69% more than new customers. So putting brakes on communication after the primary sales would definitely be a costly mistake. Therefore, after you have made a sale, start an automated email campaign with your customers. Keep them in the loop with subsequent offers on your new and other products and services.

These are few points you should remember while sending your customer retention emails:

  • Thank your customer for their businesses with your brand
  • Let them know when their purchases will arrive or how they can activate your services
  • Check to see how much they are satisfied with their purchase
  • Check to see if they need any further help regarding your products and services
  • Request a review by sending a survey form tailored to your customer’s interests
  • Offer interesting contents as a ‘gift’ to your purchasers without pitching only on your brand

Now that you know how much a CRM can help you, you should also understand equally that CRM cannot replace the natural and earned skills of your sales representatives. Hence, use your CRM to free up your sales team’s time and help them to do what they are hired for.

Try-ConvergeHub-For-Free

Email automation is the perfect way to educate and move your leads, prospects, and customers through your sales funnel, without further wasting any more time.