There’s a dark cloud that looms over the sales and marketing teams
This is similar to asking somebody if the sky is blue! You know this already. It exists, and it’s been a perennial challenge to solve for businesses.
Consequently, it impacts your buyer journey, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
What can cause this situation in your company?
Here are six common reasons why:
- Working independently, without context into each other’s work
- Having a fragmented view of the customer
- The sales team continuously disqualifying leads generated by marketing
- The sales team not being able to convert the sheer volume of marketing leads
- Using different tools that don’t speak to each other
- Misaligned goals and strategies
This is changing slowly, as more organization leaders are looking to unify both teams. Because the fact remains: you get five huge benefits by fully aligning them.
What do you get with a fully aligned sales and marketing team?
There are five key benefits to an aligned sales and marketing setup.
1. Approach and identify ideal customers more precisely
The marketing team is generally responsible for creating buyer personas. This is done through data from website and social media, discussion with sales teams, research, and insights from client case studies or interviews.
On the other hand, the sales team has daily conversations with prospects and customers.
The sales team understands what the pain points and challenges are essential to the clients, what they think about the pricing structure, and which deals can be quickly closed.
The marketing team can then identify what the prospect or buyer reads on the website, their interests, a suited subscription plan, and more.
This helps them classify the ideal target customers for the company.
By combining these insights, both the sales and marketing teams can better understand ideal customers and create personas accordingly.
2. Boost lead qualification
An aligned sales and marketing system allows all customer and prospect information accessible from a single place, nurture leads from the marketing team, identify sales-ready prospects, and more.
As a result, prospects are generally better qualified, you get higher chances of conversion and it reduces possibilities of churn.
3. Instantly connect with prospects
One of the attributes that influences lead conversion is reducing response time.
The quicker you respond to leads, the higher chances you have to convert them.
By working together, the marketing team can send more marketing-qualified leads to the sales team.
They can then qualify and get in touch with them sooner. However, both teams need to be on the same page on the ideal customer profile (ICP) for this to work.
4. Focus on a single goal
It is important to guide the sales and marketing teams towards a common goal.
On the one hand, the marketing team looks out for new sources of prospects and launches campaigns to increase awareness and generate interest in the product.
On the other hand, the sales team carefully plans and implements processes to convert prospects into paying customers.
If both teams work towards a common goal, they can better understand each other’s targets and processes and be on the same page.
5. Provides competitive intelligence
Marketing teams usually take a lot of time to research what the competition is doing, what kind of content they have on their website, their pricing strategy, et cetera.
This is then evaluated with a definitive strategy.
They can then keep your sales team continuously informed about the tactics they use and how they position the competition.
This helps the sales teams explain to the prospects why your product is better than the competition.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation involves using either on-premise or web-based software to automate marketing activities and processes with a performance-oriented goal.
Here are three common capabilities of marketing automation software:
Take more definitive decisions with actionable insights – The ability to track the online behavior of website visitors
Move forward with business development insights – The use of email and social media marketing, search engine optimization
Break mundanity with workflow automation – The complete automation of marketing operations within the company
What is sales automation?
Sales automation is achieved through a CRM tool in an organization, which helps attract, track, nurture and close leads. This tool usually comes with powerful automation capabilities that help perform tasks with little to no human effort.
Here are five stand-out capabilities of sales automation software:
Automatic data logging – Activities such as logging emails and phone calls are automatically done and are available to be viewed by sales managers for their reference.
Surefire data capture – Your prospects can enter your CRM through various ways, such as visiting your website, responding to emails or chat, or signing up for your products.
Break-free communication – Sales sequences and emails are automated and can be sent at predetermined intervals.
Effortless lead management – Sales managers can automatically assign leads based on territory or custom rules, reducing the time taken to do this individually. This improves productivity and improves lead response time.
Artificial intelligence with deep-level insights – A sales automation software provides actionable insights such as ready-to-close deals, detecting if your contact is out-of-office, chances of deal closure, and more so that sales reps have extra guidance in taking deals forward and ensuring that tasks get completed.
Benefits of a “SMARKETING” system
The best way to keep your sales and marketing teams entirely on the same page is to have a CRM system that also comes built-in with marketing features.
Delight your buyers and convert them
Since the sales teams have full context into what the marketing team does and vice-versa, both can provide more personalized customer experiences right from the start.
This helps provide consistent experiences for your prospects and improves conversion rates.
Save the hassle of multiple tools
Imagine this: one tool for calling and a separate tool for prospect information.
If that sounds exhaustive enough, imagine having yet another tool for taking notes and another for viewing and managing your pipeline.
While it is possible to have a setup like this, it will not work due to your data being scattered and you’d have to switch between these tools frequently.
A “SMARKETING” solution has all these convenient functionalities in a single system.
Save time and add precision with insights
Sales or marketing campaigns can quickly be scheduled with insights from both teams. A sales CRM with marketing capabilities helps you achieve this from a single system and easily personalize them using insights from the sales and marketing teams.
Track ROI of marketing campaigns
As a manager, you can easily track the return on investment of the marketing campaigns that your teams launch and understand what works well and don’t to optimize your process.
What’s more, you can also correlate this with sales analytics (since they’re both on the same system), identify bottlenecks, and fix them for better conversation rates.
Break information silos
A CRM that has marketing automation capabilities solves the problem of information silos that is common between the sales and marketing teams.
Since prospect data from campaigns, websites, chat, or discovery calls get captured in a single place, both teams don’t have to work out of context anymore.
In turn, this allows for faster lead qualification and better conversion.
Is there a solution that combines the power of sales and marketing automation into one tool?
Enter Freshsales Suite.
Freshsales Suite – a unified solution for sales and marketing teams
With Freshsales Suite, you can attract, engage, nurture and close deals within a single solution.
Attract
Get a complete view of your sales and marketing leads
View conversations over the phone, email, and chat with your prospects, learn more about what they are looking for from your website, how responsive they are to emails, notes taken by the sales or marketing team, and more.
And the best part is that all this information is captured in one place for hassle-free access by the sales and marketing teams.
As a result, all teams have access to the same information about the customer, which helps them deliver more personalized experiences throughout their buyer journey.
Learn more about contact management
Attract leads with webforms and AI-powered chatbots
With Freshsales Suite, you have the choice of designing web forms from scratch and deploying them on your website or leverage an existing one to capture prospects.
As soon as the prospects enter your system, their details get automatically enriched with website usage and social media information.
You can also trigger messages through an AI-powered chatbot to send your prospects contextual information such as relevant links, webinars information, discounts, trial extension, and more.
Learn more about Freddy AI
Engage
Engage in full context with your prospects
Use the 360-degree customer view to send your prospects more contextual emails, have relevant conversations with them on the phone, or help them out with useful information via chatbots.
This helps nudge them in the right direction when they have to make a decision. You also get a fully-powered AI system, Freddy, that identifies prospects that are most likely to convert and provides you with actionable insights on the next best decision to take.
Learn more about chat campaigns
Integrated phone with powerful features
Make calls and log them from within the same system with Freshsales Suite. You can purchase numbers from different countries for a localized experience, monitor your team’s conversations, transfer calls quickly to another agent without loss in context, and more.
Using your team’s call duration information and recording, you can also analyze and optimize future calls to help agents be more efficient.
Learn more about cloud telephony
Run segmented campaigns
Divide your customers based on demography, geography, behavior, business size, or plan value and run custom campaigns based on these parameters.
You can also use time-based segments to send emails at the right time and use advanced filters to target a specific customer group.
Learn more about customer segmentation
Nurture
Send sales sequences and run marketing campaigns
Nurture your prospects and contacts depending on what stage of the buyer journey they are in. You can schedule automatic emails on occasions like birthdays or anniversaries to show your prospects and customers that you care about them.
You can also run targeted campaigns or trigger in-app notifications after they convert regarding upcoming events and features, webinars, or even run surveys to understand how satisfied they are with the product.
Learn more about sales sequences and marketing campaigns
Close the deal
Leverage powerful analytics and optimize your sales process
Analyze and predict your sales or marketing team’s numbers with advanced analytics. You can also take a deep dive into which territory, salesperson, team, or look into which marketing campaign contributes to the most ROI, compare it with those that aren’t performing well, and optimize further for better performance.
Learn more about sales reports
Visual pipeline for game-changing deal management
Store and track all your deals in one place with a visual pipeline.
You can have a custom weighted pipeline, understand which deal is likely to close, get notifications on rotten deals, move from one stage to another, have multiple pipelines, and more.
Learn more about Pipeline Management 2.0
Still not convinced? Why not sign up for a free trial of Freshsales Suite for 21 days and see for yourself?
