CRM sales and marketing alignment: Finding the right approach to smarter selling

Information silos between sales and marketing departments are growing more than ever. And sales and marketing misalignment costs organizations tons of revenue opportunities.

Whether the culprit is divergent sales processes, mismatched workflows or unclear buyer personas, the current divide leads to trillions of dollars in lost revenue.

More than $1 trillion per year, to be exact.

By aligning sales and marketing teams, companies not only perform better, but teams can also benefit from:

• More creative problem-solving

• Better employee retention

• Increased agility

The importance of aligned employee schedules

A crucial, often overlooked aspect of aligning sales and marketing efforts is the synchronization of employee schedules.

Why? Your sales and marketing teams must work in tandem to close deals. Your marketing team fills your sales pipeline with leads, and your sales team turns leads into paying customers.

Messy schedules (or a complete lack of scheduling) cause incompatible timelines and disrupt the cohesive approach to selling.

In contrast, aligned schedules facilitate:

• Consistent messaging across departments

• Smoother communication

• Timely follow-ups

When teams work in tandem, with a unified understanding of availability and project timelines, they can adapt to customer needs and market changes.

Plus, you reduce the risk of missed opportunities when both teams are fully informed and prepared to support each other’s efforts.

Challenges in the modern buyer’s journey

Another cause for misalignment is the modern-day buyer’s journey, which is no longer a straight, direct path. This makes tracking leads increasingly difficult.

Prospects tend to jump between sales and marketing teams multiple times, receiving a different customer experience between the two. Over-communication from multiple departments can lead to distrust and strained relationships with potential customers.

Over time, this impacts your brand reputation and consumer perception, inevitably reducing revenue.

With all of this potential for miscommunication, over-communication and damage to your brand, it’s essential to use a customer relationship management system (CRM) that can help you align your marketing and sales efforts. This means no more information silos. No more inconsistent processes. And no more confusion.

CRM software helps your organization keep track of and manage all your interactions with current, potential and former customers and other stakeholders like vendors, partners and investors.

Quality CRM solutions are valuable because they offer a complete image of what your customers do online. As our CRM playbook says, “CRM can serve as the single source of truth for your customer data, giving you actionable insights into your ongoing sales and marketing initiatives and overall organizational health.”

These platforms also often include:

• Sales pipelines

• Contact management and activity tracking for each prospect or customer

• Workflow and task automation features

• Email marketing capabilities

• And other sales and marketing tools to help you nurture relationships with customers and leads

With these tools in hand, businesses can hyper-personalize their entire marketing and sales approaches. From building tailored sales funnels to automating lead nurturing campaigns, CRM systems can help you put your best foot forward so qualified leads never slip through the cracks.

For instance, with Copper, a Google Workspace CRM and end-to-end client relationship tool, you can:

• Build and maintain personal relationships at scale with email and marketing tools

• Automate tasks like recurring check-ins, follow-ups and notifications

• Organize contacts and keep all of your relationships in one central place

• See how your sales reps and business are doing with custom reports

• Set up custom sales pipelines to track deals and opportunities

• And so much more

Beyond eliminating information silos and improving contact management by using quality CRM software, it’s also crucial to take a hard look at all of your data sources.

By using rich data insights to inform your marketing approach, sales process and sales funnel, you can better align your sales and marketing departments — beating silos for good.

Tapping into data to create unified strategies

So what data should you be tracking to beat these silos? And how can you apply these insights to get all teams on the same page?

• Customer behavior data: Analyzing patterns in customer interactions and purchases helps both teams identify what’s actually driving sales (whether it’s marketing initiatives, product features or something else entirely).

• Market trends: Sales and marketing teams should follow current market trends to align their strategies with what’s working industry-wide. This strategy also helps prevent them from operating in a vacuum.

• Lead response data: Tracking how potential customers respond to different sales approaches and marketing campaigns can reveal what’s effective and what’s not.

Now, let’s take a look at an example in action. Suppose your latest email newsletter went off without a hitch. Leads for your payroll software start pouring in.

From the outside looking in, your pipeline is filled with high-quality leads. But then the sales team reports that not a single lead has converted. What’s the deal?

Based on feedback collected during sales calls, the team discovered these new leads lacked a detailed understanding of the tool’s benefits for small businesses. In other words, the email caught their attention but lacked the right information to win them over.

To address this issue, your marketing team could collaborate with sales to create follow-up email sequences with informational content like:

• Feature explanations

• User testimonials

• Case studies

The goal? Highlight all the benefits of ‌payroll software for small businesses so leads can make an informed purchase decision.

This new strategy, complemented by detailed FAQs for the sales team, will help improve lead conversion rates thanks to more successful alignment and communication between teams.

Provide consistent learning opportunities to your team

Access to resources supporting ongoing education is also crucial for making the best marketing and sales decisions.

Provide your team with additional resources and learning material so everyone can stay on top of the most effective sales and marketing strategies.

Encouraging each team to learn about the other’s strategies can significantly enhance their effectiveness. For instance, when sales personnel understand the rationale behind marketing campaigns, they can better leverage these insights in their sales pitches.

Similarly when marketers have a grasp of sales challenges and techniques, they can tailor their efforts to generate high-quality leads that are more likely to convert.

To achieve this, consider investing in quality courses and books to learn new sales strategies, such as:

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

• The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

• Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance by Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana.

These books examine the critical processes that drive sales performance, complete with key takeaways and real-world examples. Consider having your sales team read them first and discussing them as a group, then passing these resources to the marketing team.

This shared learning experience can help foster a common language and understanding between sales and marketing. It paves the way for improved collaboration and, ultimately, better conversion rates.

You can also set up ongoing sales and marketing training, host mixers and brainstorming sessions, and invite keynote speakers to present their top strategies.

Silos between your sales and marketing departments can wreak havoc on operational efficiency and your bottom line.

That’s why it’s vital to align your CRM sales and marketing goals by doubling down on data applications. It’s the secret recipe for boosting customer loyalty.

By applying key insights based on real customer interactions, you can create personalized customer experiences and open the door to unlimited sales opportunities.

Author bio: Ryan Robinson is a blogger, podcaster and (recovering) side project addict that teaches 500,000 monthly readers how to start a blog and grow a profitable side business at ryrob.com.