CRM for SMBs: Tying Sales and Marketing Together

It's no surprise that when each of your departments work together, you deliver a more cohesive customer experience to your prospects and customers.

However, very few companies have implemented a collaborative environment, and many still work in silos. These departmental silos only create confusion among teams, enterprise-wide data issues, and fragmented customer relationships. Breaking down these silos and creating a unified business contributes to increased productivity, happier employees, and a better overall customer experience.

How Small Business CRM Can Help Break Down Silos

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses today is the lack of shared data across departments. Departments work within their own silos, creating their own datasets. While it might work for them in the short term, this data is only a small part of the customer experience.

If sales only have one view of the customer, from a sales perspective, they miss out on campaign touchpoints, website visits, customer support requests, etc. . They do not have a complete view of the relationship between the company and the customer. This lack of contextual data weakens the commercial relationship. Sales are unable to adapt their approach based on customer behaviors and actions.

On the other hand, when data is shared between departments, everyone in the organization has a complete and up-to-date contact record containing behavioral and demographic information. Complete contact records allow for greater personalization and segmentation, higher internal productivity, and a more efficient organization overall.

Collaboration between departments encourages accountability between departments. Because shared data benefits everyone, when a contact record is incomplete, it affects its usability. For example, if marketing doesn't have access to sales data, it's harder for them to create tailored lead nurturing campaigns. Not to mention that sales and marketing (as well as customer service) must share a common goal: to create seamless, personalized experiences that drive conversions and ROI.

A seamless experience means unrecognizable transitions between sales and marketing departments. The customer journey should span all departments, not just one. Instead, a prospect should feel no turbulence between departments. Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin. Marketing messages and touchpoints connect directly to sales touchpoints and effectively guide contacts through your sales funnel and conversion points.

The problem of departmental silos

Service silos create divergent visions and goals. Marketing wants to attract as many leads as possible, while sales wants to focus on and close qualified leads and higher revenue deals. Sales people complain to marketing that they don't provide enough qualified leads, and marketing blames sales people for not doing enough to follow up on the leads they bring.

This is how departmental silos traditionally operated in the past. Everyone is for himself. This mindset promotes competition and conflict rather than collaboration and teamwork. Unfortunately, this attitude will also show its ugly face to the customer, resulting in an awkward customer experience.

Setting a common goal – driving more conversions – benefits both sales and marketing. Marketing focuses on bringing in leads that sales can close more effectively. Sales provides valuable insight into the quality of leads, the type of conversations they're having, demographics, and more. It's a win-win.

For example, if reps want to close more high-value deals, they need to talk to marketing about the nature of those leads. Marketing can then adjust their strategy to target more high-value leads.

A common goal means sales and marketing are aligned to nurture and more productively convert leads into customers.

However, creating a shared vision requires shared data. Having a single contact record that tracks all touchpoints throughout the customer journey not only provides sales and marketing with a more complete picture of the contact and their relationship to your brand, but also gives every department access to invaluable data that they can use to better build relationships and ultimately close more deals.

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