Member Article

Sales + Marketing: The strategy for business growth

Modern CRM systems enable the alignment of Sales and Marketing – discover how this equates to business growth.

Ask salespeople if they work in marketing, and their response would be a resounding no. Ask a marketer if sales is part of marketing and quite a few would agree with the notion, but in practice they’d still see the two functions as sitting apart from each other. With a modern CRM system these silos can be broken down, requiring Sales and Marketing to collaborate.

Furthermore, the two way flow of information between sales and marketing allows for the necessary level of interdepartmental integration, as organisations strive to become more consumer-centric. Marketing can also conduct research and segment customers in a way that can help salespeople to better understand and target particular types of customers.

“The key to modern business is [about] ensuring that throughout an organisation all departments are working towards a common objective, albeit through different means”, writes CRM consultant Paul McLaughlin in his Linkedin Pulse blog, ‘The benefits of sales and marketing alignment’. He adds that Sales and Marketing are the “engine driving most organisations, but other departments can also benefit from better inclusion, notably the customer support arm.”

Modern CRM Systems The best way to achieve sales and marketing alignment in order to make Sales + Marketing = the strategy for business growth is by implementing a modern CRM system because:

• It will enable your organisation to create a transparent pipeline by giving staff with access rights to a CRM database the ability to know what other people within their own and other departments are doing. Managers can then use this information to develop more efficient processes, and it enables them to gain insight in order to develop their strategy for business growth.
• It will offer a single view of the customer, from a single data source: According to McLaughlin, whose Linkedin Pulse post was published in April 2015, “30 percent of marketers feel that a disparate data source is the main reason they fail to glean useful information about their target audience”.
• Collaboration improves customer insight: When all of Sales and Marketing, for example, work together and connect to each other through a modern CRM system, they become more effective and efficient because it becomes easier to collate and share data for the development of customer insight.
• The ability to access a complete history of existing and previous customers can enable sales and marketing to work as one as a team, allowing them to work together to increase revenue by targeting prospects, customers and markets that are likely to deliver the highest profitability.
• Remembering to support your customers and to learn more about them can improve sales, retention and loyalty rates. With a modern CRM system you can cross-sell and up-sell to new and existing customers in order to generate new revenue streams and sales opportunities.

You can also score your sales leads, according to their Net Present Value or according to how likely they to become advocates of your brand by applying a Net Promoter Score. Marketing can also support sales by qualifying the leads and by helping sales to understand customer needs, wants and desires. This analysis can be based on transactional history, demographics and on the scores. This saves time and money, while allowing sales and marketing to define its strategy for business growth.

Discover more about how a CRM system can help your business achieve growth by copying and pasting this link http://bit.ly/1MVD66f into your browser reading: ’The Ultimate Guide to: Driving business growth using CRM’.

This post first appeared on the Redspire blog.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Billy Lyle .