There may be no bigger sales effectiveness obstacle in most sales organizations than the disconnect between Sales and Marketing. Even though both Sales and Marketing are ultimately responsible for driving revenue, they often report to different executives, pursuing slightly different goals, and using conflicting measurement objectives. This results in Sales and Marketing frequently being at odds with each other.
Marketing focuses on developing a variety of creative campaigns to generate interest in the company’s products and services. These campaigns can take months to prepare and roll out. The leads generated by these programs then must be captured, categorized and delivered to the sales team over a period of time. Consequently, the leads generated by marketing campaigns are usually slow to show up on the sales team’s radar screen, and it is not unusual for many of them to be poorly qualified. As a result, 75% of leads generated by Marketing for Sales are never followed up in a timely fashion, wasting the time and energy of both groups, and leaving both groups pointing fingers at each other for the poor results.
So, how can an effective CRM deployment strategy help overcome this disconnect? First of all, a properly configured CRM makes it much easier for Marketing and Sales to communicate, share and transfer information, and carry out planning and strategy initiatives. When everyone has access to the same information and the same capabilities in real time, breakdowns in information flow can be eliminated, and critical benchmarks and deadlines can be more easily met.
However, the advantages go beyond enhanced communication effectiveness; a properly configured CRM is a tremendous boost to genuine collaboration so that Marketing and Sales can begin to work together seamlessly to launch and support highly targeted sales initiatives. By leveraging all the capabilities of the CRM, Sales and Marketing can efficiently collaborate to design a tightly coordinated effort that aligns messaging, product sets, pricing, margin, sales cadence, and sales goals into one seamless effort. It is even possible to roll it all with a defined beginning and ending, so that ROI can be easily captured and measured. This type of highly coordinated and unified strategy can eliminate cross-departmental competition and significantly enhance planning and execution of sales activities. Both Sales and Marketing processes should come alive inside integrated work streams enabled by the CRM, and finally deliver the result that the entire organization is looking for: closing more business at higher margins.
Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/.
Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.
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