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When your marketing and sales teams work in harmony, everything tends to get a little easier.
Yet, many modern businesses still haven’t found a unified approach to bring their two most growth-focused teams together. While your sales team has insights into what motivates leads and their particular concerns about your solution, your marketing team has access to market information, trends, competitive analysis, and specific campaigns and tactics that will resonate with certain demographics.
Still, if they’re working in silos and are not collaborating consistently, you might miss out on several high-quality sales opportunities. This has enormous implications for your sales machine and by extension, your growth trajectory.
Why You Need Sales & Marketing Alignment In Your CRM
By aligning your sales and marketing team in your CRM, you can facilitate a positive, data-driven customer experience that enables all parties to fulfil their common vision — whether that’s increased conversions or more targeted buyer insights.
The alignment between sales and marketing, commonly referred to as 'Smarketing,' has become a crucial asset for many companies to drive sales growth and enhance customer loyalty. In this article, we’ll explore how you can tangibly achieve Smarketing alignment and how your sales and marketing teams can work together in your CRM tool.
PROVIDE SALES ENABLEMENT TOOLS
By having your marketing team collaborate with your sales team, you can develop robust sales enablement tools for every stage of the buyer journey — from SQL to closed-won. This can include everything from demo videos and nurture templates to proposals and brochures. Not only will this facilitate a consistent branded experience for the customer – with consistent messaging about the specific product or service – but it also ensures that the sales team creates targeted, brand-adherent resources to pass to marketing.
DEVELOP SHARED LEAD SCORING CRITERIA
By assigning different scores to different demographics and prospect actions, you can quantify the likelihood of each lead becoming a sales opportunity or customer. This isn’t just vital information for the sales team, who will be working to convert those leads, but for the marketing team, who will want to develop targeted content for each score range.
By establishing shared criteria for lead scoring, both sales and marketing teams can leverage a reliable system in terms of prioritizing and nurturing leads through the pipeline. It’s also essential that both the sales and marketing teams are equally involved in creating this criterion and identifying the specific attributes that contribute to the scores.
CREATE A SHARED ICP/PERSONA TRACKED WITH CUSTOM PROPERTIES
It’s fairly standard at this point to have the sales and marketing teams work together to define the target audience and build Personas/ICP. However, many organizations still haven’t learned how to leverage their CRM to document and track those discussions. Through the Custom Properties in your CRM, you can thoroughly track the opportunities and determine whether they fit into your ICP categories.
Once you’ve created the Custom Properties, you can access enhanced reporting about conversion rates, time-to-close, lead source, and more.
Tech Tip: As much as possible, create your custom properties as defined dropdown or multi-select lists. Using these field types will allow you to create detailed reporting that open-text fields do not.
USE SHARED SALES AND MARKETING DASHBOARDS
You need to have a single source of truth when it comes to aligning sales and marketing activities. A shared dashboard would enable both teams to actively track how their work impacts key growth processes while saving them from the manual work of compiling their own reports. Both sales and marketing can also view and monitor each other’s goals and processes through the dashboard — leveraging real-time information to make informed decisions about their respective funnels.
With Attribution Reporting, which is available in CRMs like HubSpot, you can seamlessly match new contacts and deals with the exact marketing assets, sources, and campaigns that moved them through the pipeline.
OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE
There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for implementing alignment among your sales and marketing teams. With each change in your organization, industry, tech stack, and workforce, you’ll have to reassess existing workflows and make improvements. That being said, if you have a solid foundation of how this alignment operates within your organization, it’s much easier to adapt to changing circumstances.
Moreover, with a powerful CRM designed for extensive sales and marketing functionality, you can effortlessly bridge the gaps between your different teams and empower them to work together towards a common goal.
MORE TIPS ON SMARKETING ALIGNMENT
For more resources and tips on how you can achieve sales and marketing alignment, be sure to download our e-book on Effective Sales and Marketing Alignment. Not only do we walk you through some actionable ways you can align your sales and marketing efforts, but we share how you can customize your CRM to meet your growth objectives.