In spite of the indispensable requirement of both sales and marketing driving an organization with the same force, there has been always a constant coarseness in between the two divisions. Marketing people are dissatisfied with the way salespeople handle their leads while sales people always complain of being offered non-serious inquiries to them. It’s a well proven fact that imbalance between the two parties highly depreciates an organization’s chances of generating higher revenue.
Why Discrepancies Are Seen Between These Two
These differences in thoughts are the result of competing agendas and limited transparency in the process. The process is not completely visible as to what type of output is sent by the marketing department to the sales team. Sales and marketing keep following their own principals, rules and agendas, ignoring the other one. Ironically, in spite of being crucial elements of the same agenda, the alignment of these two streams get difficult.
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Why Synchronization Is A Must-Do Here
The current market panorama depicts a great effect of globalization and customer centric approach. Products are within easy reach because of advancement in internet technologies, and it’s easier for consumers to check for various varieties of product range, product comparisons, whether product specification matching their needs or not, etc. With a complete change in customer’s buying methods, change in the sales and marketing process gets mandatory. Earlier the sales people were the main point of contact and source of product education to the customers. Now, customers are intelligent enough to extract the product details and reviews directly from the company’s website and social media, which is the main marketing conduit for any organization. With this change, the need of synchronization between the two departments get as important as ever before.
Some ways sales and marketing should be working together :
- Foster relationship between the teams – This is one of the strategies that are both fun to write and also fun to implement. To be clear, fostering relationships goes beyond just by holding regular meetings with the meetings. Looking into each and every deal which gets closed and rooting deep into them are the best ways to foster public praise which encourages the teams to keep up their hard work.
- Breakdown the barriers with the right hires – Bridging the divide between the two teams starters with whom you hire. If you are filling all the positions, try to look for candidates who have worked in both sales and marketing roles. Look at your recruitment process and add up few questions in such a way that it will force them to talk about their experiences working with both teams.
- Systemize lead scoring – The marketing and sales team should have an ongoing conversation about the lead conversion such as what’s working, what’s not working and who is working on it etc. Creating and converting MQLs to SQLs, ultimately to win all the deals is always a moving target – that is why it is important to ask all those questions and to figure out why it is working and not working. Both the sales and marketing team should create one system for scoring and evaluating.
- Use collaborative analysis – When you are trying to align the two departments, it’s not just enough to focus on the KPIs and collaborative practices. When you are breaking the departmental barriers, all the lines will more likely blur between what the marketing and sales teams are exactly working on. It is important to analyze and measure all the results of the team, which will help the team to get on the same page about ROI and understand how the collaborative efforts are impacting your bottom line.
Benefits of Alignment
- Increased Revenue: Organizations with aligned sales and marketing teams see faster profit growth and higher customer retention.
- Shorter Sales Cycles: Alignment can significantly shorten the sales cycle by ensuring that leads are properly nurtured and handed off.
- Improved Customer Experience: A cohesive strategy ensures consistent messaging and personalized interactions, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
- Enhanced Team Collaboration: Breaking down silos fosters a culture of teamwork and shared success.
How To Balance The Two
It needs a well defined strategy to integrate the two channels of revenue generation as a single platform. It is utmost important to make realize both teams need to work collaterally to increase the revenue and profitability. Here are some steps that you must follow to drive an integrated sales and marketing approach within your organization:
Centralised Data
The major reason for truffle between the teams are due to an unorganised system of data sharing. In many cases, sales and marketing team end up doing the same set of items due to inefficient methods of work tracking and status sharing.
CRM softwares like SalesBabu CRM plays a very important role in managing data across teams and avoid any duplication and repetition of work items. As sales and marketing team are closely related, marking a correct set of boundaries help in understanding assigned work items in a better way.
Salesbabu CRM provides a cloud based centralised database which keeps a record of each and every activity in the organisation, starting with customer data management, work items and tickets assigned to every sales agent, marketing work item follow ups tagged with every enquiry or booking along with complete information of the ticket history. Every individual workload and assigned work items are clearly documented and tracked on a regular basis using this software system.
Many other features of notes in the ticket section, dashboard pages for individual team members and managers help to understand the work time assigned to each individual and personal performance.
These features creates a unified system of workload balance and data sharing across teams and have an organised system of data tracking and management.
Lead Management
Disparity and ambiguous sales funnels are one of the major causes of conflicts across teams. SalesBabu CRM provides various activity tracking mechanism which helps in administering every stage of lead management and handling individual stages with utmost efficiency and dedication. Once a stage of work is completed, the lead is handled over to the next stage for further lead nurturing and maintain an organised system of Lead management and tracking. Lead nurturing can be done by both sales and marketing team in phases by providing appropriate notes in lead details which helps to understand the current state of lead nurturing and avoid any repetitive work.
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Latest Market knowledge
Analysis of individual performance and market trends help in maintaining a better work environment for sales and marketing members. Dashboard screens, easy to create inbuilt and custom reports and other features in the SalesBabu CRM software facilitates easy monitoring of different trends in the market and performance tracking within the team.
The sales and marketing team managers can track individual performance and distribute work as per their work loads and credibility and help in better sales order monitoring and closure.
Also, Mobile Sales app feature in SalesBabu CRM helps in sharing live location and work items when members are on the move and help in better management of work and improve productivity of the team with efficient workload balance among the team members.
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Regularise sale process across teams
With an organised system of sales process, maintaining a balanced workload for both sales and marketing team is more convenient. As we know, both sales and marketing team play an important role during the lead qualification and filtration process followed by rigorous rounds of lead nurturing activities.
With a centralised system of quotation and sales order monitoring along with activities and followup entries for each of these lead nurturing process is very useful in maintaining clear demarcation between the responsibilities of each team and maintaining decorum for following the work item assigned. No overlapping and confusion arises when there is a systematic system of tracking each stage of lead management and handling individual roles with due diligence. Salesbabu CRM provides an organised and systematic system of sales process and continue to maximise productivity and revenue generation for the firm.
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Conclusion
SalesBabu CRM is a great tool to organise the efforts of both the sales and marketing team and maximise output for the firm with a systematic approach towards workload balance.
