Importance of Connecting Marketing and Sales Systems for a More Holistic Approach

For various reasons, sales and marketing teams are often siloed in most organizations.  More recently, there has been an effort by many growing businesses to align the two departments.  Chron refers to this type of alignment as a vertical marketing system and recommends it as a much more efficient marketing force.  One of the most effective ways to begin this alignment is by connecting the marketing and sales systems each of them uses to accomplish their work. With connected systems, there tends to be more natural collaboration.

Connecting Marketing and Sales Systems

Integrating your marketing and sales systems will give you the benefit of combined data. This is a barrier that inadvertently tends to separate the two groups.

Implementing tools that inherently combine marketing and sales information, tasks, documents, and more is easy to do and will result in numerous benefits for your organization. More powerful CRM software can provide this for you and set you off on the road to success. If you need more convincing, these benefits are outlined below.

Benefits of Connecting Marketing and Sales Systems:

The importance of connecting these systems is unmistakable when you look at the benefits of it. Getting two of the most important revenue-driven departments to work as one can ultimately increase your bottom line.  Here’s how:

1. Better Understanding of the Customer and their Journey

Marketers and sales folks tend to have different expertise when it comes to understanding customers.  For instance, a marketing professional might understand how a customer might choose one organization over another because of their commitment to the community or the environment.  Meanwhile, a sales rep will know exactly how to close a deal by telling them how specific features will benefit them individually.  Now, imagine combining those forces!

Similarly, by being able to map the customer journey more fully with a better understanding from all perspectives, organizations have a much better understanding of the experience from the customers’ point-of-view. This translates to being able to target customers much more effectively.

2. Integrated Customer Feedback

Marketing and sales both hear feedback from customers, some good and some not so good.  If marketing hears about specific pain points or preferences, but the sales team doesn’t get wind of it, nothing helpful will happen.  However, if all information that each group receives is located centrally, for all to see, good things are bound to result.

With this feedback from both marketing and sales in-hand, the symbiotic relationship will result in a higher likelihood of implementing customer feedback. Marketing may have found out a prospect’s preference for communication, for instance, and can pass it along to sales easily. Or sales may determine a customer would benefit more from other products or services you provide so you can send them over to marketing for more information on the other products.

3. Better Support

With a combined tool for both sales and marketing to collaborate on, leadership has a full view of the progress the teams can make together.  A full understanding of the effectiveness of the collaboration will turn leadership into champions for your departments.  They will likely do what they can to help perpetuate the partnership. It may even help them understand how more integration between other departments can help the bottom line and remove even more silos that may exist in organizations.

Having more transparency with your teams’ accomplishments is bound to have a greater impact on all other departments as well. Perhaps they will have a better understanding of how they should interact with each other or should have been interacting with the sales and marketing groups.

4. Better Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing

Of course, using the same tool between both teams instead of separate marketing and sales systems will naturally lead to better collaboration between them. This goes beyond doing tasks together and generating leads with shared information. This is more about gaining a good rapport among team members, resulting in a more positive work-life, more productivity, and increasing motivation. Happy employees are good employees.

5. More Aligned and Well-defined Strategy

Any marketing strategy should be supported by the sales strategy and vice-versa.  But, what if the strategies are born out of an integrated sales and marketing team, therefore, making them align perfectly?  Combining forces will result in a much more well-defined and cohesive plan from promotion and distribution to purchase without needing to strategize the hand-off.

The strategy itself will be easier to create with the joint system in place and most of the tools that are available to the teams in one location.

6. Bigger Budget

Of course, combining sales and marketing teams has another large implication: you can now combine budgets! With a larger, combined budget, it can be much easier to put your resources where you need it most at a moment’s notice.  Removing any conflicting resource pools can eliminate some of the natural competition that can come between departments as well.  Since both budgets are part of the greater business development process, it makes sense to be able to move resources according to needs at any given time.

7. Better Marketing Content

According to LinkedIn 81% of businesses with aligned sales and marketing teams collaborate on marketing content, while only 25% of non-aligned companies do.  Quite a big difference.  With better communication and collaboration between the two groups, marketers are better able to get messages out that customers and prospects need and want to hear.

With silos removed and all relevant information centrally located and accessible by both teams, there’s no telling how much quality content can be created and distributed.

All-in-One Marketing and Sales Software

The most effective way to combine these systems is with all-in-one marketing and sales software that offers everything that both teams need to do their own jobs, access information supplied from the other group, and collaborate on all projects necessary to drive sales. You can try to take two separate software systems and combine them, but it will ultimately be more work. Software that combines both team’s efforts into the same software is a more powerful option.

Agile CRM has an all-in-one solution that completely combines sales and marketing for an easier alignment between teams.  It includes all of the contact management necessary to drive sales that are accessible to marketing teams as well. More importantly, it includes marketing automation features that will allow your marketing team to automate and accomplish its tasks within the same software as sales. Sales can have access to all of the marketing material that they will distribute so they can have direct input into the collateral.

Agile CRM’s sales enablement and marketing automation can be a huge first step toward getting your teams to align more effectively. Plus, with the ability to include more workplace productivity apps within the 500apps Infinity Suite, you can set all of your teams up for success.

Conclusion

Having an aligned team with aligned strategies, budgets, materials and customer-centric service will surely make your business more successful. Combining marketing and sales systems is one of the most important steps you can take to align your sales-driving teams. Using more robust CRM software is going to be key. Agile CRM can help.