Combining sales and marketing platforms helps growth teams communicate better, coordinate their efforts, and save money.
There are two common problems with using multiple software platforms for all your sales and marketing tasks. First, you run the risk of information getting out of sync, with updates in one platform not appearing in others. Second, you’re likely overspending by paying for multiple products.
Not only is a unified sales and marketing tool more cost-effective, but it also acts as a central information hub for growth teams by keeping all historical customer information in one organized and searchable place. Growth teams gain full insight into buyer relationships so that no context is lost at any point in the buyer’s journey, keeping everyone on the same page at all times.
Sales and marketing software is any platform that helps organizations track all the details of their customer relationships through the entire sales funnel while offering tools to help sellers and marketers build better relationships with their buyers.
Bringing your sales software and marketing tools together into one platform unifies your sales and marketing teams. This creates more cohesive collaboration between these departments and leads to better customer experiences.
It’s often used by growth teams to capture leads more effectively, nurture and engage them toward a sale, and provide ongoing value to existing customers.
What does a growth team do?
A growth team is a group of sellers and marketers working together to accomplish a single goal: revenue growth. By eliminating silos between these teams, marketers gain a better understanding of which efforts produce viable leads, and sellers gain insight into what their potential buyers are interested in. This closer relationship between sellers and marketers leads to higher quality leads, higher conversion rates, and more sales over time.
4 ways that marketing and sales software provides a positive ROI for growth teams
Streamlining your tools into one growth team platform helps ensure that time isn’t lost working out incompatible integrations or doing busy work like updating client files and transferring data between platforms. In other words, using an all-in-one sales and marketing tool allows users to spend more time on their highest ROI activities.
Improving lead quality
One of the best ways to improve the quality of your B2B leads is to align sales and marketing teams on what a qualified lead really is, how quality should be measured, and what both departments should do to continue nurturing the relationship.
Software for sales and marketing software can help growth teams develop a mutually beneficial feedback loop that promotes high-quality lead generation and improves growth team alignment by keeping everyone in sync, up to date, and focused on clear, measurable goals.
Determining the best sales and marketing platform for your small, medium, or enterprise business boils down to your company’s fundamental needs and goals. However, growth teams of all sizes need a few core features to ensure they get the most from this integrated software solution.
Your growth team will benefit from this amalgamation of essential sales software and marketing tools with these essential platform features:
Task automation capabilities that help move leads through your pipeline faster and save your growth team time so they can focus on more critical tasks.
Reporting and analytics features that let you generate custom reports to track and share the metrics that matter to your business.
Email marketing tools that make it easier than ever to create, schedule, send, and track newsletters, broadcasts, and drip sequences.
Intelligent prospecting functionality to help you find, add, and contact prospects that meet your ideal customer profile.
Artificial intelligence capabilities that translate to enhance team efficiency, better customer experiences, and improved relationship building.
The best sales and marketing software platforms
The software for sales and marketing detailed below offers a set of features that fulfill the essential operational needs of sellers and marketers. We’ll go over what every tool does, which features growth teams should pay special attention to, and the pricing options each brand offers.
We’ll also offer tips for how growth teams can use these standout marketing and sales platforms to improve their productivity, streamline collaboration, and maximize their investment.
Email marketing, user-friendly dashboard, follow-up tools, web forms with automated follow-up messages, syncs client information across all devices and users
The flexibility of Nutshell’s marketing and sales platform makes it a very valuable CRM for marketers. Nutshell’s email marketing automation suite, Nutshell Campaigns, allows sales and marketing teams to design and send beautiful marketing emails, automatically trigger drip sequences based on subscriber actions, instantly see who’s engaging with their messages, and manage all of their customer nurturing from a single tool.
Sender is an easy-to-use and full-featured multichannel marketing tool combining email and SMS tools within a single platform.
Sender helps businesses communicate with their buyers using an omnichannel experience. With just a few clicks, you can access everything you need for effective email marketing and SMS, and the tool is surprisingly affordable compared to other leading email marketing providers.
With Sender, you can professionally manage contacts and create sophisticated automated scenarios, including abandoned cart messages and welcome sequences. In addition, popup and subscription form features help you gather leads effectively, while automation simplifies lead nurturing and scoring techniques. It’s a true all-in-one marketing platform with refined features, and you can take it for a spin with zero financial commitment.
ActiveCampaign is an automation tool designed for integrated email marketing and customer relationship management that’s mostly geared toward small businesses looking to meaningfully engage with customers at scale.
In terms of growth features, this sales and marketing software platform offers omnichannel management for everything from email to text messaging to social media as well as machine learning tools. Packages range from $15 a month for 1,000 contacts to $1,169 a month and more for 50,000 contacts, depending on your contact list size and which upgrades (such as lead win probabilities and design services) your team may be interested in.
Keap, another small business favorite, is an email marketing and sales platform that organizes all of your client information and daily work in one user-friendly dashboard. Its features help users quote customers, schedule sales calls, create invoices, collect payments, and foster long-term relationships using a CRM with follow-up tools.
Keap helps you email, call, or text leads right from your phone. It streamlines all payment activities with one-click features and syncs client information across all devices and users.
Keap’s pricing starts at $249 per month for up to 2 users and 1,500 contacts. What sets Keap apart is that they don’t offer feature-based plans. When you sign up with Keap, you get all its sales and marketing features, with pricing depending on how many users and contacts you need.
EngageBay is a fully integrated all-in-one marketing, service, and sales platform that provides small to medium businesses with modular solutions. The platform has various tools to automate redundant and manual tasks, build and organize contacts, visualize deals, manage sales, and support customers—all from a single, easy-to-use platform.
EngageBay’s software is neatly categorized into three stacks for marketing, sales, and service. Each stack is called a ‘Bay.’
The Marketing Bay has many compelling features, ranging from automation and scheduling to landing page and form builders. You can also keep your content up-to-date on various social media platforms using their ‘Stream’ feature.
The CRM & Sales Bay has impressive tools to streamline your company’s sales process, and gives you a bird’s eye view of your leads and the statuses of your deals. You can connect with third-party calendar applications to schedule appointments with customers and get a holistic view of your sales progress using visual charts and insightful metrics right from EngageBay’s dashboard.
The Service Bay offers a prudent way to manage and issue customer tickets quickly and efficiently, all from one place. With remarkable features such as canned responses, support groups, and autoresponders, your business can quickly view, prioritize and solve tickets in a customer-friendly manner. Additionally, you can interact with your customers in real time with EngageBay’s Live Chat feature.
With a CRM, migration services, and onboarding sessions, EngageBay is one of the best options for small businesses and startups looking for a comprehensive solution to their marketing, sales, and customer support needs.
HubSpot is a full-service platform for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They’ve also become a go-to educational resource for professionals at every level of these departments.
HubSpot offers a basic free CRM as well as hubs for sales, marketing, service, content management, and more. These hubs offer a wide range of features. The Marketing Hub offers email marketing, online forms, and automation, while with the Sales Hub, you can get lead management, email templates, call tracking, and more.
HubSpot’s pricing ranges widely, from the free option to more than $3,600 per month, depending on the features you want, the seats you require, and the number of contacts you have.
Insightly is a sales and marketing platform for unified growth teams that includes key tools such as task automation, a robust CRM, and popular app integrations.
Their standout growth features include a customizable marketing automation roadmap that allows marketing and sales teams to visually plot out a full cycle strategy for various customer segments.
You can purchase the marketing and sales features separately or opt for the all-in-one solution, which starts at $349 per month for the Pro package, $899 per month for the Plus package, and $2,599 for the Enterprise package.
Zoho is a digital office suite for complex enterprises that allows users to store notes, manage projects, send invoices, and more. They even offer remote work help with features such as virtual training and meeting tools.
While they offer a variety of bundles for HR, Finance, and IT departments, growth teams would be most interested in Zoho One, their A to Z business platform, which boasts a complete “lead to cash” solution and a full suite of tightly integrated marketing and sales tools with more than 40 streamlined app integrations.
Zoho offers a 30-day trial with a custom pricing quote.
Maximize impact with growth tools
Not using a sales and marketing software platform to unify teams and promote growth yet? You may be wasting a lot of unnecessary time on miscommunications, unstructured workflows, and lost sales. Adopt one of the suggested tools above to help automate tasks and guide your team toward rapid growth.
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