Kapture Sales & Marketing

How is CRM blending your sales and marketing operations

Kapture Sales & Marketing

Sales and marketing are two entities within an organization that didn’t always get along famously. When sales were disappointing, the marketing team blamed the sales force for its poor show. The sales team claimed that the marketing team set the prices too high and utilized a large chunk of the budget. More broadly, the sales department believed that marketers had no idea with what’s really going on with the customers, while the marketing department was adamant that the sales force had a small perspective of the market since they were too focused on individual customer experiences. In short, they tended to undervalue each other’s efforts.

In the modern context, it has become imperative for both these teams to realize that they need to work in unison to create value for both the company and its customers.

When the sales and marketing teams are working independently, the salespeople do not bother to create product demand but rather focus on fulfilling it, while marketers fail to understand the ratio of the money spent to actual sales made and end up allocating money in the wrong directions. A poorly coordinated business will definitely suffer, as any efforts by the marketing team could only bring in results if the sales team is well prepared to capitalize on it. When the sales and marketing wings work seamlessly, companies see substantial improvement through shorter sales cycles, lower market-entry costs, and lower cost of sales.

More often than not, the failure in achieving goals lies in the misalignment of tools, data, and communication. This can be fixed only by blurring the lines drawn between sales and marketing operations, which can be achieved by implementing a robust Customer Relationship Management system.

Working without boundaries –

A CRM software service ensures that all the relevant data is securely stored for long periods of time, and is easily accessible at any time by an authorized person. CRM facilitates collaboration, which means that the various departments of a company, such as sales, technical support, and marketing, can share the information that they collect through interactions with the customers. They can share documents, keep track of sales calls, track performance, monitor individual performances, update product knowledge, etc. This provides the business with a better picture of what’s going on and helps in building mutual respect between the sales and the marketing teams.

Transparency that blurs lines –

The CRM’s marketing automation tool helps tremendously in lead scoring, which identifies qualified leads based on both their demographic and behavioral data. This information is updated on a single platform, giving sales personnel the ability to view a prospect’s score and grade from within the CRM. This transparency allows the sales team to determine the markers for a qualified lead and identify them at a glance. This helps the sales team in dedicating their time for more productive work.

The regular marketing updates allow CRM to easily perform market analysis in a short span of time. The CRM software service builds transparency by making market analytics accessible to all the departments. The sales team, armed with insights derived from these analyses, can formulate a better selling approach and also provide their buyers with vital market information, which could eventually increase the customer conversion rate.

The right blend for success –

CRM helps in lead delegation by automatically assigning the leads to sales personnel once they reach a predetermined threshold through the pipeline. The sales team then works to push the leads through the sales funnel. The leads that get stalled or become cold in the process are bounced back to the pipeline to be nurtured by the marketing team, which again trickles down the pipeline to the sales team for conversion. The CRM ensures that any lead that is generated is either converted or nurtured to be converted by a combined effort of the sales and marketing teams.

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