CRM for Sales and Marketing Alignment

Many of us prefer to go it alone in the workplace, harboring our data in our own spreadsheets and tolerating meetings as we think of all the work we could be doing in our cubicles. However, the most productive businesses are those that encourage collaboration—not just within separate departments, but throughout the enterprise. When departments share the same data and purposes, they can efficiently solve problems and improve processes. Departmental silos, on the other hand, promote confusion and waste time as individuals pursue different, unrelated goals and lack immediate access to crucial data that can optimize their performance.

This is a classic problem among sales and marketing departments, which far too often sacrifice efficiency and lead flow by refusing to align their information and strategies. With some simple strategies and a Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce CRM implementation, sales and marketing teams can work together to generate leads and deliver personalized customer experiences.

Schedule Joint Meetings

When sales and marketing teams take the time to gather in the same place, both departments gain a complete vision of their lead-generating processes. The sales team should give the marketers insight on where their most recent leads are coming from and what materials are attracting the most attention. From there, both departments can determine how to create and revamp marketing materials to clinch deals and attract new business.

But this is only the launching point for bringing marketing and sales together. True collaboration goes beyond good, old-fashioned communication and requires the help of CRM.

Use Predictive Analytics

Far too often, companies lose out on deals because of fragmented customer experiences, resulting from a disconnect between sales and marketing. Maybe marketers are pushing out content that fails to generate leads, or maybe salespeople are unaware of existing marketing materials that perfectly match a client’s interests. These issues dissipate when businesses utilize the predictive analytics of their CRM instances to collaboratively make better decisions and improve customer experiences.

Predictive analytics enables your sales and marketing departments to identify target customers and align practices to gain quality leads. Real-time and historical data offer crucial insights on your customers and sales trends, enabling marketing and sales teams to define activities around finding the right leads and achieving higher close rates. Businesses can leverage data to predict the likelihood of closing deals and funnel leads to effective sales resources. Additionally, marketers gain profound insight into their content’s performance. By finding out which content attracts high quality leads and large deals, CRM empowers marketers to enhance future content.

With the predictive analytics of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, businesses can leverage customer data to align sales and marketing strategies for higher profits.

Centralize Data

The struggles of navigating customer data without CRM are more than anybody in sales or marketing should bear. Seeking crucial data often requires opening and closing a number of documents and programs—spreadsheets, databases, shared drives, accounting programs and more. We’ve discussed reasons for salespeople’s distrust of CRM, but the benefit of centralized data alone should encourage an implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce. Imagine the amount of time and stress reduced when all the data you need is stored in one place? That’s the power of CRM.

Centralized data improves not only the efficiency of individual departments but also the capacity for collaboration and overall company productivity. CRM users can easily access up-to-date order histories, sales activities, marketing analytics and more. That means sales teams can find useful marketing materials, and marketers can leverage customer data to target relevant campaigns to specific people. When data is united in one platform, your sales and marketing teams can also unite to increase sales.

Wrap Up

Collaboration starts all the way at the beginning of your CRM software journey. Identify the needs of all CRM users and provide comprehensive training so that marketing and sales teams gain the most from the software. Additionally, businesses should pursue a collaborative approach to software implementation by teaming up with the trusted consultants at Datix. In our 20 years as enterprise software solution providers, we have performed countless implementations and integrations that have improved business processes. Besides being certified partners with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, we are also an Epicor Platinum Partner, making us leaders in providing optimal CRM and ERP solutions.

As if that wasn’t enough, Datix can break down more departmental silos through our integration solution, Unity. By enabling businesses to connect a variety of software, Unity centralizes data across your enterprise to provide transparency and efficiency for streamlined business processes.

Reach out to our Datix consultants today to find out more about our CRM and enterprise software innovations!

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