Competition is good; it motivates, it makes us better, and weeds out poorly executed ideas or plans. But sometimes competition within different business departments can be harmful to the business as a whole. A great example of this is the discord that can exist between sales and marketing. Today we'll be talking about how to get your sales and marketing teams to work better together with CRM!

The Great Divide

Technology has helped bridge the great divide between sales and marketing but often these two departments are placed in silos and have zero communication. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools have helped businesses bridge that gap. Through a company's CRM, you can monitor a lead's journey from new to closed-won. Of course, as you may know, it is easier said than done. To get the most out of your CRM there needs to be an understanding, a contract if so inclined, between sales and marketing. This agreement helps the sales team and marketing team understand and remember what their goal is: business growth.

The Question

There are regular discussion topics when marketing and sales have a meeting. Well, really just one: LEADS. How many leads do we have? Where are we getting more? When are we getting more? How much have these leads bought? What is the return-on-investment (ROI) for this campaign?

Answering the last question is our focus and is the blueprint for bringing sales and marketing together. Why? Finding the ROI brings the cost of the campaign (marketing) and how it turned into business (sales) together to give us an answer. On the flip side, if you think about the answers to the other questions we asked there would be blame thrown on either sales or marketing. Blame is how the divide grows but ROI is something everyone can get behind. ROI helps make business decisions.

So we turn this on you. Do you know what the real ROI is on your marketing campaigns? If you're not sure, it's time to find out.

The Tool

If you're on our blog, you most likely have a CRM or have worked with a CRM. If you don't have a CRM, welcome! It's never too late to begin receiving information about your organization from CRM software. By 2017, the CRM market worldwide will hit $36.5 billion. With that type of money there are plenty of options to choose from, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is one of the top choices.

Whichever you choose (we recommend Microsoft Dynamics CRM obviously) it's important to make sure you can get the most of your CRM data. Most CRMs can give you basic information on leads, lead source, phone calls, status, and plenty more right out-of-the-box. The one thing you need to make sure you have is the ability to score your leads. Being able to score leads helps you understand where individual leads are in your pipeline, how long does it take to closed-won, what content the lead has consumed, and most importantly, your ROI.

At PowerObjects, we have developed add-ons for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that help us understand the data behind the leads. Some of the top add-ons we use include PowerWebForm, PowerWebTraffic, PowerScore, PowerMailChimp and PowerNurture. With these add-ons we can see where the leads came from, how many times they've visited the site, what the lead's score is within our funnel, and create personalized marketing materials for each persona. We use all of this information to make better business decisions and understand our ROI through CRM.

FYI

Within a blog of 1,000 words or less, there isn't a lot of time to discuss the behind the scenes work that goes into getting the most out of your CRM. To this day our PowerObjects team meets on a weekly basis to discuss our plans for lead generation and understand what is working and what isn't. Before we even began our own projects, we sat down with multiple stakeholders within the organization. We discussed what works with our lead process and what doesn't. We created rules that outline the project's objectives. We used data and an understanding of our business to create persona buckets that we can place our leads into and nurture them with personalized content. We created nurture campaigns for each persona. Plus, we created a sales and marketing macro funnel to help visualize where a lead enters and where it goes as it interacts with our content.

To get started, keep the process as simple as possible. Keeping it simple can help you implement a minimal solution quickly. Getting it started ASAP will help you collect data and modify your marketing and sales campaigns to better fit your leads' desires. This process needs to be monitored constantly and reported on, at least, bi-weekly.

Pro Tip: Find someone that understands the capabilities of your CRM. This person can be in-house or a company of record but you should have an expert that can create the rules and edit the lead scoring without issue.

The Answer

The answer to how sales and marketing can get the most out of CRM together isn't easy. Some will say it's a sales problem, others will say it's a marketing issue, but it's important to remember that your problem isn't an individual department one, it's a business problem. CRM is the glue for your sales and marketing departments. It will help you find your ROI and then optimize your lead generation. Giving you a process to create customers more efficiently but most importantly grow your business! Learn more about CRM and all the ways it can help your organization with these interactive videos!

Happy CRM'ing!