Sales and marketing alignment is the third biggest priority for marketers today, after lead generation and conversion. It’s easy to understand why businesses are prioritizing alignment. Companies with highly aligned sales and marketing processes grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable.

If you’re struggling to align sales and marketing, you’re probably already aware you’re leaving a lot on the table. In this article, we’ll show you how client relationship management (CRM) software can be just what you need to bring these two departments together.

How Does CRM Help Sales and Marketing?

Sales teams often spend their days talking to prospects over the phone, in person, via email marketing, or other digital communication tools, steering them towards making a purchase. The process can be short or long (depending on your industry, product, and customer journey), and it entails learning about the customer’s pain points to better understand how your product or service can solve them.

Here are some ways a CRM tool helps the sales process:

• Maintains personalized interactions with prospects and customers.
• Allows sales teams to score leads, assisting with targeted lead nurturing.
• Tags leads with certain indicators and classifications, so sales teams can send better, more personalized offers and messages.
• Streamlines the sales process to save time and money.

Marketing, on the other hand, is a more holistic process that involves creating brand and product awareness to generate demand. Using a CRM tool can help marketing teams:

• Track and organize prospects and customer details to send targeted campaigns and promotions
• Derive actionable insights from marketing reports on campaigns, preferences, purchases, and much more. By gleaning these insights, marketing teams can segment lists more effectively and initiate targeted follow-up campaigns.
• Run more effective A/B testing to hone in on personalized messaging that’s successful.

How a CRM Aligns Sales and Marketing Teams

1. Communication via Unified Dashboards

Sales and marketing teams play different roles yet share very similar goals and objectives. If the sales team logs into one system and marketing into another, chances are they will lose visibility of progress and veer off the team’s common goals.

Using a CRM system enables both teams to work off the same data and metrics. It helps them get a better understanding of what’s paying off and what’s not. Moreover, using the same tools and dashboards aligns communication and fosters a better working relationship.

2. Shared Goals and Objectives

The success of your sales and marketing tactics comes down to effective orchestration via integrated plays. In other words, both teams have to work together as a single unit, with clear expectations of one another.

A CRM can help create a bridge between the two departments, allowing them to stipulate goals that demand joint efforts. For example, the teams can define lead generation, lead scoring, and lead nurturing goals and agree on the best metrics to track.

Moreover, each team will be clear on their roles in achieving the agreed targets. During team standup meetings, teams can track progress and decide how to tweak their integrated plays to remain on course.

3. Reduce Duplicate Efforts

When sales and marketing teams use the same CRM system, they see the same picture of the revenue generation process. They can tell where each web visitor, lead, and customers stand in the buyer’s journey.

It becomes easier to join forces and act as a unit rather than a disjointed function. For example, you won’t have a case where the sales department sends a message to a prospect right after the marketing team shared the same message.

4. Deeper Insights for Better Decision Making

As mentioned earlier, using the same CRM system enables sales and marketing teams to share the same data. For example, both teams have access to the available lead’s contact information, and the data is updated in real-time.

If the marketing department hands a lead over to the sales team manually, there may be little information about the prospect’s interests, needs, and preferences. However, a CRM populates the lead contact’s profile with this information instantly. When the sales team receives a lead through a CRM, they’re armed with fresh and accurate data. By constantly improving the contact’s profile, the sales team will be in a better position to nurture more leads into customers.

5. Activation Through Proactive Notifications

As much as sales and marketing teams work towards a common goal, their roles differ. Your marketing team generates leads, whereas the sales team nurtures those leads to turn them into customers.

A CRM system can help the marketing department send proactive alerts to nudge the sales team to take action. For example, you can set up a notification to alert the sales team to instantly follow up with a new lead or remind them to call prospects at the right time.

The sales team can then include a comment that is sent back to the CRM to loop in the marketing team on the progress. This keeps both departments in perfect sync.

Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

It’s never been easier to align your sales and marketing teams, especially with the use of a reliable CRM tool such as BenchmarkONE. Sign up free and learn first-hand how businesses are improving lead generation, enhancing lead quality, and increasing overall deal size.