In many competitive businesses, sales and marketing teams often work against each other. In fact, there is often competition between the two groups, with sales teams often deriding marketing teams as being support staff. This is because sales teams typically have revenue goals tied to the department, which makes marketing be seen as a support position to help sales hit their goals. In contrast, marketing teams often see themselves as a part of the business that can drive revenue for the company independent of a sales teams, and the two often clash as a result of this. Fortunately, there is a software solution that can help marketing and sales teams work together and be accountable to one another.
That software solution is a CRM. But what is a CRM? A CRM, of content relationship management software, helps businesses collect prospect and customer information, from the first interaction until the end of the customer life cycle. These customers can then be segmented in order to run effective marketing campaigns and to optimize the sales process. While sales teams and marketing teams may be reluctant to work together, a CRM can help them easily share information and work in concert with each other in order to identify prospects and identify quality customers.
For example, a marketing team can use a CRM to build a lookalike audience for a paid social campaign. The information for this audience can be derived from existing prospects that a sales team is working on. Using this information, which would be housed in a CRM, the marketing team can then create a buyer persona and base the lookalike audience off of this.
Once this is done, a marketing team can then run paid ads on Facebook or other social media platforms to a lead magnet, such as a downloadable PDF that is geared toward a particular buyer persona. Once the lead magnet is used to capture the information of the customer, the marketing team can then upload that information into the CRM. The sales team then has what can be considered a warm lead. They can then track the progress of this warm lead, and see if they open further emails or are looking for further communication with the company. If so, the sales team can then reach out to them at an opportunity time, which greatly increases the possibility of a sale.
There are, of course, many ways that sales teams and marketing teams can work together by using a CRM. But this example should illustrate how easily a CRM can break down barriers of communication and competition between the two teams and foster a culture of communication and collaboration. A CRM can be used in other ways specifically by either the sales team or marketing team, but its strengths really shine when it is used as a collaborative tool to organize and manage customer information. In doing so, both the sales team and marketing team will be able to better focus on what they do best: sell and market products to prospects and potential customers.
