A lot of time and financial resources are invested in sales and marketing departments, and the KPIs related to these two teams may perform poorly if there is no coordination. In a customer-centric world as of today’s, syncing the activities of sales & marketing teams is crucial to ensure a healthy financial performance and positive customer satisfaction scores. Even when businesses implement CRM, it is often observed that sales and marketing teams do not communicate with each other, and run parallel campaigns affecting CRM performance and associated ROI. If you wish to make the most of your CRM, coordination between these two outward-looking teams is a necessity.

Uncoordinated Campaigns Cost Money and Fetch Poor Results:

According to a recent report, a lack of communication between sales and marketing teams is the most common source of conflict for 2 out of 5 marketing professionals. Efficiency is observed to drop steeply when sales & marketing teams do not share key data related to performance, campaigns and customers. A coordinated effort is a key to improving sales performance and the success of marketing campaigns. As customer happiness is associated with the positive performance of KPIs related to these two teams, communication between the two teams are absolutely necessary.

Without Coordination between Sales and Marketing Teams, you Stand to:

1. Spend more on parallel campaigns without seeing results
2. Relevancy of sales message suffers, while marketing campaigns may be perceived as “out of touch” by customers
3. Redundancy of customer communication eventually results, and customer satisfaction scores dropdown

What you should really do:

• Begin with sharing CRM data between sales and marketing teams
• Integrate sales & marketing performance tracking by increasing inter-team collaboration
• Share the responsibility of KPI performance among both the teams
• Sales and marketing campaigns should be planned together and should be in sync with each other
• Performance auditing should be collaborative and consistent with shared goals

CRM Data Will Not be Consistent Unless Teams Communicate:

When businesses implement CRM, they often do not realize the confusion that results when customer data is repeatedly entreated into the system by different teams. Though one of the primary goals of CRM is to hold all customer-related data on a single software program, exactly the opposite happens. If data is closed and is not accessible to different teams, it may result in redundancy and even duplicity. It is important to have a unified customer database for both the sales teams. Any changes made to this database should be visible to both teams.

You Cannot Expect Data to be Consistent if:

1. You do not allow marketing teams to access sales data and vice versa
2. Campaign performance data needs to be coordinated
3. Communication between teams is poor, and healthy inter-team dynamics is not stressed
4. You give room to the infamous sales rivalry. Also, you have to give room for marketing rivalry.

Make sure to:

• Treat customer data as a single database
• Allow everyone in sales & marketing teams to view changes made to the database
• Run analytics and report generation tools with both sales and marketing data in mind
• Share predictions with both the teams if you have prediction tools installed

Identify Cross-Selling and Up-Selling Opportunities:

Most sales professionals agree that if they knew a little more about their prospects, they probably could have snagged in up-selling or cross-selling in a more focused manner. Opportunities are often lost because they do not have access to deeper psychographic or behavioural data. Marketing databases allow sales teams to evaluate and support sales leads better, and engage in more efficient pitching. Marketing automation tools gather valuable information about customers such as their pain points, buying authority and interests. All these datasets help sales professionals to close deals more efficiently.

You can only Cross-Sell and Up-Sell if:

1. Both sales and marketing teams have customers’ buying history
2. A record of previous customer interactions on various channels including social media

Here is what you should do:

• Identify opportunities based on previous customer interactions
• Change sales pitch often to up-sell products and services
• Selling unrelated services and products is easier if you understand customer behaviour and needs

A Concerted Effort is a Key to Success:

Certainly, a number of opportunities are lost due to the traditional lack of communication between sales teams. As well as marketing teams. In spite of implementing CRM, many organizations continue to withhold information between these two teams. Enhancing communication between sales & marketing teams is crucial to CRM success. CRM is a tool that can only go to a certain extent until datasets are shared between concerned teams so that they can make a concerted effort in improving the performance of various related KPIs. With better insight and communication, you will also witness more opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell, leading to better ROI on not only your CRM but your business in general.

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