Successful selling relies on effective integration between the sales and marketing departments within businesses. In the past, the two functions have often been at odds. Sales has typically been sceptical about the quality of leads provided by marketing. For its part, marketing has frequently been unimpressed by sales’ commitment to following up leads.

In today’s fiercely competitive business world, this traditional disconnect between the two departments is no longer acceptable. Estimates suggest that worldwide just over a trillion dollars is spent on marketing every year and that the typical firm spends a significant proportion (around 10-30 per cent) of its overall budget on marketing.

Naturally, key decision makers within companies want to ensure they are getting the best possible value from this investment. Consequently, they carefully scrutinise the performance of their marketing departments and their ability to generate return on investment for each campaign.

This is where customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can help in bringing together integrated sales and marketing applications over a common platform infrastructure in order to drive operational efficiencies and meaningful metrics.

By using systems of this sort to support a closer rapport between sales and marketing, businesses can ensure that marketing gains useful feedback from the sales force about lead quality and that leads are tracked all the way through the process.

Tracking Leads and Generating Metrics

In a recent survey carried out at February’s Technology for Marketing Show in London,23 per cent of respondents identified the ability to track leads as the most important benefit of the integration between sales and marketing. By keeping tabs on leads and interactions with prospects, trends can be identified and marketing processes refined, ensuring that no sales opportunities are missed.

The ability to track leads should extend to a wider focus on generating high value strategic data about the whole sales and marketing campaign.At any one time, businesses need to know not just the latest status of all their leads but also their lead-to- sales conversion ratio and lead-to-sales revenue. Equally, they need to understand these metrics so that they can incrementally improve on them over time.

Identifying Hot Prospects

One of the most important ways in which sales and marketing can interact within any organisation is in the transfer of leads from marketing to sales. And yet, estimates suggest that currently around 70 per cent of leads provided are never pursued. The sales department typically believes either that the quality of the lead is poor or alternatively that the buyer is not yet ready to make a purchase.

To avoid such a waste of resources, CRM systems or processes must be able to assess the value of leads objectively. Depending on the characteristics of the end user business, the system should be able to assign a certain weighting to each lead. This approach enables the company to prioritise and pass the right opportunities to the most appropriate sales team member.

It is critical to get hot prospects into the hands of the right sales person as quickly as possible. After all, if the sales force is focused on priority leads, they are more likely to be successful in closing a sale.

Information Sharing

The best CRM systems will also enable the sales function to reject leads provided by marketing but at the same time provide constructive feedback as to the reasons why.

Instead of merely discarding an opportunity, the salesperson simply selects from a drop down box the reasons why he does not wish to pursue the lead. It could, for example, be that he does not deal with a particular industry sector. In such a scenario, rather than having the lead ‘fall between the cracks’, it can now automatically be picked up and re-routed to the correct person.

Equally, the lead could be strong but the timing poor. Perhaps the prospect is at a bad time in its buying cycle. If so, rather than losing the opportunity, the CRM system can store the lead within a ‘nurturing bucket’.

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The marketing department can then concentrate on learning more about these leads. By building trust and interest over time, marketing will be able to move these prospects through the sales cycle until they are ready to re-engage with the sales team.

The key to success is information sharing between the two departments. Typically, it may take two, three or even more ‘touches’ before a prospect is ready to engage with sales. Each of these interactions can provide invaluable insight into customer behaviour.

Sharing information about a lead across an organisation can immediately differentiate a company from its competitors as well as closing the trust gap between a salesperson and the prospect and between the sales and marketing teams.

Critically, a chosen CRM solution also needs to be flexible. Many campaigns have a very long sales cycle. Typically by the time they discover what their win/loss ratio is, it is too late for companies to modify their campaign. That is why the best CRM solutions will deliver quick ratio statistics showing how the campaign itself is affecting the sales pipeline. Adopting this approach enables companies to make early adjustments to their sales and marketing campaigns.

Reaping the Rewards

More companies today are now appreciating the benefits that tighter integration between sales and marketing can bring them. They are generally happy to invest significant sums of money in marketing but only if they can then deliver a tangible return on that investment. They increasingly realise too that in order to achieve this it is imperative that their sales and marketing teams are working together using fully integrated systems.

Giving teams the right solutions enables them to do their jobs better, shorten the sales cycle, enhance first impressions, follow through on all ‘responses’ and leads with the appropriate resource and generally become more productive. These solutions can also help businesses to track and calculate ROI for each campaign but more importantly help them understand what approaches were most successful and why so that they can proactively refine campaigns for even better results in the future.

Front Range Solutions