How a Good Sales CRM helps Sales & Marketing Teams to collaborate better

Introduction

One of the toughest challenges that business leaders face today is business functions working in silos. The siloed approach to working is highly inefficient and detrimental to the performance of the business. Sales-driven organizations are one of the most impacted teams due to the lack of collaborative approach between Sales and Marketing teams. While the importance of collaboration needs more emphasis, most business leaders do not have many avenues at their disposal to execute this. Technology can be of great help in bringing together sales and marketing teams to work in alignment and help the overall business growth.

The Importance of Sales and Marketing Collaboration

Marketing and Sales are two of the most critical business functions for any organization. Businesses strive towards a common goal with responsibilities split across departments like marketing, sales, service, and others. More departmental silos create friction in achieving the best results. Limited data sharing, infrequent communication, and breaking down customer journeys hamper sales and marketing functions equally in their respective goals. According to a survey conducted by LinkedIn, 60% of respondents believed misalignment between sales and marketing could impact their financial performance.

Some common friction points between Sales and Marketing teams are:

• Poor lead quality by the marketing team
• Delayed lead sharing by the marketing team
• Poor lead nurturing by sales teams
• Inadequate follow-up on leads by the sales team
• Little insights from sales teams on buyer persona to optimize marketing campaigns
• Marketing campaigns objectives are not in line with the sales team’s requirements
• Insufficient information inflow leads to poor strategy deployment across teams

3-important things that can help address this challenge

1. Vision by Leadership
2. Adequate Resources and Strategy
3. Right Technology (a good Sales CRM solution)

How a Good Sales CRM fosters collaboration

A robust sales solution can address most of the challenges which have created barriers to how sales and marketing teams function and prevent active collaboration between them. The Sales CRM solution should have powerful automation features, deep 2-way integration capabilities, and the ability to customize the sales CRM solution, reporting, and analytics modules.

The sales CRM solution acts as a single source of data across the buyer lifecycle providing enough information to both teams. A single view of the sales pipeline gives rich insights to sales teams to focus on high-priority leads with a higher propensity to convert. Likewise, marketing teams having ready access to conversion reports can tweak their campaigns for the best quality leads. Additionally, in the longer-term sales funnel, buyer conversations provide enough information to marketing teams to understand customer needs and buying behavior and design crafted marketing campaigns focused on this customer profile.

Key use cases that a sales CRM solution can help address

1. Integration of all Demand Generation Channels: Integration of demand generation channels like Website, Digital Campaigns, mobile apps, offline leads, channel partnerships, and affiliate leads with the sales CRM aggregates leads from all the demand generation channels in real-time. With leads flowing in the CRM, instantly, sales teams can make outreach efforts and improve their First Response Time (FRT). This will improve their conversion rates significantly by engaging with customers within minutes of a lead filled by the customer. Automated lead ingestion saved critical manhours.
2. Integration of Marketing Data with Sales Funnel: Leads tagged with the channel information are helpful to both marketers and sales teams. Sales teams can prioritize their leads with this additional information and run a more efficient pipeline and convert more leads. Marketing function on the other hand with a single view of the sales funnel and the lead channels help them run more targeted campaigns on more converting channels.
3. Unified Reporting and Dashboard: One of the essential ways to bridge the information barrier between sales and marketing is to provide access to information to all involved stakeholders across the buyer lifecycle. Marketers will start having access to insights at different stages of the sales funnel like converted buyers, Not interested reasons, buyer conversations, sales cycles, etc. This goes a long way to help marketing teams deeply understand buying patterns, and their requirement around products/services.
4. Workflow Automation for Collaboration: Businesses can improve their speed of execution with workflow automation designed to automate tasks with minimal human effort and judgment. Marketing teams can push critical inputs on specific leads for salespeople to utilize and act upon. Alerts and reminders by marketing teams for buyers looking to make purchases.  
5. Marketing Planning and forecasting with Lead Pipeline access: Marketing teams having access to the sales pipeline enables real-time status and quality of the sales pipeline. They can turn around faster with marketing activities, plan additional activities with weak pipelines, or throttle existing campaigns to achieve common business goals with the sales teams. Better forecasting and planning inputs provide greater flexibility to the business to make efforts to reach business objectives on a routine basis.

Conclusion

Sales CRM solutions suited to expand collaboration between sales and marketing teams are a definite need for any modern organization. Benefits range from unified alignment to the common business goals of the organization to a single view of the customer journey for all teams. Businesses also stand to gain in terms of a faster turnaround cycle, better business insights, a high-quality lead sales pipeline, and a single view of reports for the buyer journey.

Aided with better resource mobilization and a clear strategy toward alignment efforts, a great sales CRM solution is pivotal to any organization’s efforts to braking down inter-department barriers and create a high synergy working environment for achieving the business goals and objectives. A recent survey by Outfunnel corroborates the fact that a survey where more than 73% of the respondents were optimistic about healthier business performance after driving better sales-marketing alignment.

Chakra Sales is a modern sales execution solution to productize your sales process from Lead to Order, eliminating manual activities and multiple data entries. By integrating all associated tools, Chakra Sales creates a unified interface for sales activities with automated data capture and activity logging.

If you are looking for a customized sales solution for your fast-growing organization, do consider a free demo with Chakra Sales.