Enhancing Sales and Marketing Collaboration with CRM

Although sales and marketing should have common goals – acquiring customers, closing deals, and ensuring high customer satisfaction – in practice, they often work separately, pursuing their own KPIs, and sometimes even conflicting with each other. Unfortunately, situations where salespeople complain about the low quality of leads provided by marketing, while marketers resent the lack of lead engagement by the sales department, are still common. Sales representatives are reluctant to engage in marketing projects, and marketers are frustrated with a low marketing budget. Does this sound familiar?

In this blog post, we will provide insights into how a well-chosen and utilized CRM system can enhance collaboration between sales and marketing departments.

Marketing and Sales – Conflict or Collaboration?

As usual, the blame doesn't lie solely on one side – the real issue is the lack of collaboration between them, leading to a mutual lack of understanding. To achieve collaboration, common data sources, sharing knowledge about customers, and shared goals, processes, and standards are necessary to transform internal frictions into a cohesive marketing-sales process. One methodology that effectively designs the entire customer relationship process is the Revenue Operations approach, which you can learn more about in our article.

It is evident that by providing representatives with the right materials, tools, and resources needed for converting potential customers, you can close more deals and increase your company's revenue. Supporting sales has many aspects. Marketing provides representatives with various resources to effectively sell: videos, blogs, or product guides that support interactions with potential customers.

However, modern marketing cannot be reduced to a supporting role for sales. Before a customer contacts a representative, they have already completed a significant part of the purchasing process. Knowing what information they sought, the barriers they encountered, and the benefits they expect gives salespeople a competitive advantage necessary to close deals. These data come from well-documented marketing activities.

The problem lies in the fact that collaboration does not always go smoothly – information is often lacking, transferred too slowly, incomplete, leading to decreased company efficiency. How can this be changed? CRM solutions come to the rescue.

How Does CRM Help in Efficient Lead Handover?

According to a Harvard Business Review study, you have an hour to contact a potential customer to give yourself the best chance of a conversation with key decision-makers and turning them into customers. See the problem? It's lead handover. It's a particularly demanding process for sales and marketing teams and should be very efficient, performed quickly and effectively.

CRM can streamline the lead handover process:

• With this tool, you can score leads and
• Automate their handover.

Based on individual criteria for potential customers, marketing teams can quickly assign them to sales representatives. This ensures that potential customers are handed over to the right sales representatives at the right time.

• Marketing teams can automatically assign potential customers based on their results, the marketing campaign from which they were generated, or their position in the sales funnel.
• Instead of manually transferring information about potential customers from marketing to sales, CRM allows marketing teams to set parameters specifying which type of potential customer should be assigned to specific sales representatives.
• Such an automated lead handover process allows for a smooth transition from marketing activities to successful sales conversions.

You can also use the CRM system to monitor and adjust lead scoring and routing rules as business goals and market conditions change.

How to Generate High-Quality Leads with CRM?

The one-hour rule mentioned earlier works only when the lead handover process prioritizes high-quality leads that are genuinely ready and capable of making a purchase.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case, a problem that affects a large group of companies. Low-quality leads reach the sales department, and some of the most promising leads are lost due to too late contact or even lack of contact. A common problem in B2B operations, where purchasing processes sometimes last for many months, is that sales representatives are handed leads that are not yet sufficiently "warm." They should stay within the marketing realm and continue to be nurtured since they are people not yet ready to have a conversation with a sales representative.

Through the CRM system, sales and marketing teams can store, monitor, and analyze customer information and track marketing campaigns. All information is in one place. This allows salespeople to check which materials the customer read or how many times they visited the website, and marketing personnel to check sales notes and content changes to better meet customer expectations. This way, lead nurturing becomes truly personalized and effective.

Furthermore, based on the data in the system, you can automatically assign points to potential customers to identify the best sales opportunities. Features like scoring, available in tools like HubSpot, enable this.

How Does CRM Help Align Marketing and Sales Funnels?

When thinking about strengthening sales support, it's worth taking a step back in the lead generation process and recognizing the potential in optimizing marketing for the sales funnel.

The marketing team needs as much knowledge about customers as possible to avoid wasting time and budget on creating ineffective content. Many specialists complain about a lack of customer knowledge, the need for a lengthy process to understand their behaviors. Many working in marketing feel they are several steps behind the customer, which unfortunately translates into lead generation and, consequently, the ability to close transactions.

That's why it's crucial for sales personnel to be involved in creating buyer personas and advising marketing on what content interests audiences at each stage. With appropriately named stages, thanks to a unified database, marketing can use CRM notes to see how content interacts with customers.

Here again, CRM comes to the rescue, allowing you to gain extensive knowledge about the customer:

• CRM funnel systems help understand customer behaviors.
• It informs you when you can present your product to customers.
• You don't waste time dealing with unprofitable customers.
• You identify profitable customers, acquire knowledge about their expectations, stage in the buying journey, questions they may be seeking answers to.

By defining lead qualification criteria, you can use the CRM system to segment potential customers based on parameters such as industry, location, company size, budget, interests, engagement level, and more. This way, you can more effectively set priorities and tailor marketing content to the specific needs and expectations of potential customers, avoiding wasting time and marketing resources on potential customers who are not ready to make a purchase or do not fit your offering.

Interested? Do you want to learn more and see how empowering the collaboration between sales and marketing with CRM can look like in practice for your company? Contact us, and we'll show you many practical solutions that will empower your high-quality lead generation process.