Are your Marketing and Sales teams integrated? Your company is probably losing opportunities and money if they are not.
Marketing and Sales are two crucial departments in any company, yet in a surprising number of cases they are not aligned. The integration of both areas can improve the customer buying process and multiply the number of sales, increasing the company’s revenue as a result.
Traditionally, the Marketing department has to generate leads and hand them over to the Sales department. Frequently very little information about a lead is made available to the Sales team, either because very little data has been captured or there is no system for any data to be shared. At the same time, the Sales tracking system in many companies is not able to share information with the Marketing department.
You can say that Marketing and Sales are integrated in a company when both teams work together to take a lead from an initial awareness phase all the way to becoming a loyal client.
Lack of integration means loss of competitiveness
According to a study from CSO Insight, the lack of integration of these two crucial departments had several negative consequences in the researched companies:
- Longer sales cycles: up to 25 percent longer nowadays than they were years ago.
- Missed quotas: less than 50% of sales representatives made their quotas.
- Less productivity: Sales staff used up to 40% of their time developing materials to support their sales efforts.
- Sales inefficiency: fewer than 25% of CMOs and 14% of Senior Sales Executives were satisfied with their ability to optimize sales efficiency and effectiveness.
So what can a company do to effectively integrate both departments?
Integration means at least sharing the same corporate brand and product positioning messages and managing all data about leads, prospects, and customers from a unified database both departments can share. For example, the salesperson should be able to see the contact and origin information the lead left in the Marketing process.
But technology can do much more these days. You can now collect data about the webpages visited by each lead, links they clicked or data they left in a form. Then, make this marketing information available to the salesperson handling the lead — and make it available in real-time.
The process can work the other way around as well.
As the salesperson updates a lead’s file and this is made available to the marketing team in real-time as well. New marketing campaigns will incorporate data from the sales department.
Delio is a Lead Management tool that has just the features needed for the perfect integration of Marketing and Sales and, ultimately, to sell more and sell better!
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