According to research by SirusDecisions, less than one out of 10 B2B companies report good alignment between sales and marketing organizations. If you don’t think this hurts your business, think again. The lack of integration of sales intelligence with sales and marketing systems causes the biggest gap between top sales performers and under-achievers.
Just like in a team sport, sales and marketing require coordination across all of the players. Players must synchronize their efforts in the game to make winning plays. Without synchronization, teams fumble and lose key opportunities to score. Similarly, without synchronization between sales and marketing, the business takes a hit.
How can sales and marketing become better teammates? With a commitment to a “team first” mentality, individual players put the needs of the team ahead of themselves. However, weak processes between sales and marketing have made it challenging for sales and marketing to work together in this type of a supportive team environment. Yet these two groups probably have the biggest need to collaborate and support each other for the benefit of the organization.
To learn how sales and marketing can become stronger team players, look at some of the top characteristics for winning teams and how new sales engagement tools and more integrated systems can help foster these traits.
1. A winning team values coordinated communications. By integrating marketing automation with new, real-time sales engagement analytics, organizations can vastly coordinate communications to the buyer. Integrated sales and marketing systems help synchronize teams, make them more efficient, and ensure that everyone is working on the same page and marching toward the same end zone.
Furthermore, by monitoring sales efforts in real-time to see what interests prospects, marketing can coordinate external communications. With increased customer insight obtained through sales systems, marketing can easily adjust their messaging to better align with customer problems and pain points – bringing more value to the organization. By integrating marketing and sales systems, organizations can improve communications throughout the entire buying process – and avoid any missed opportunities.
2. A winning team shares the ball back and forth. Have you ever missed a sales opportunity because of an incomplete customer profile? Have you ever wasted time hunting for critical customer data in either marketing or sales systems – when you could have been focusing on lead generation or core-selling activities? If you knew what happened to leads after they were sent to sales, would it improve your lead nurturing and prospect qualification?
Winning organizations freely and seamlessly share critical information to all team members. With customer data easily accessed by both marketing and front-line reps — exactly when they need it – the above pain points can be eliminated.
Real-time sales engagement analytics deliver more complete customer profiles than ever before. But this information must be shared across sales and marketing organizations to deliver the most value. Sales and marketing must share all customer insights to give businesses the most accurate and consistent view of customers.
3. A winning team always wants to improve performance. Integrating marketing automation and sales engagement systems also opens up new areas for improvement – such as increased leads and faster identification of decision-makers. By quickly revealing all stakeholders in large, complex deals, marketing can get on board with nurturing at an earlier stage.
In an integrated environment, for example, when sales documents are re-shared with additional contacts, the leads are automatically shared and synchronized with existing systems. So marketing immediately gets the new contact profile information in their systems as well. Rather than having a lone sales group holding the new data, the data is instantly shared with all team members in a unified, real-time view.
When you’re working in a large, complex deal that involves many decision makers, this capability can be invaluable – enabling marketing to nurture other players involved in the process who you may not have known about previously.
4. A winning team is open to trying new plays. In a selling environment with more informed consumers, differentiation has become essential. At the same time, it has become more challenging to understand what’s driving a prospect’s interest, as well as the urgency of their need. By capturing significant customer behaviors – through engagement with digital content – organizations have a new way to identify signals that show a prospect’s interest level. New sales engagement tools are now available that show how prospects interact with sales content on a very deep level. This depth of knowledge benefits both sales and marketing in spotting top prospects and leads and tailoring customer outreach.
Nearly half of best-in-class companies prioritize the importance of personalization of customer conversations.By tailoring and timing follow-up based on prospect engagement with content, sales teams can deliver more tailored and timely follow-up that’s been shown to close deals faster.
Sales engagement technologies are emerging that deliver insights to bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams. By helping to establish a stronger connection between sales and marketing, these technologies can streamline processes and increase productivity. Businesses can break down organizational silos, get a more accurate and consistent view of their buyers, and drive revenue through integrated sales and marketing systems.
Help your team win. Give your players the integrated solutions that empower them to work together toward a common goal.
Micheline Nijmeh is the CMO for LiveHive, Inc., whose cloud-based, sales engagement platform provides real-time intelligence based on customer engagement with digital content.
