The ultimate goal of your business is to convert new clients and earn revenue.
For that reason, two of the most important teams at your company are your sales and marketing teams. These two teams are responsible for generating leads and converting them to customers.
It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that these two teams are at their most effective when they work together. It’s no good having your teams be on totally different pages—they need to collaborate to drive more revenue, a practice known as revenue operations.
But how can they do that? One solution is to use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to help get your two teams on the same wavelength. Keep reading to learn how CRMs unite sales and marketing teams!
What does a CRM do?
Before we get into the specifics of how a marketing and sales CRM can help your company, let’s talk about what exactly a CRM does.
Essentially, a CRM is built to help you gather, store, organize, and analyze data about your leads and customers. It can pull this data from a variety of sources, arranging it in ways that let you gain insights into your audience.
The goal is to use those insights to improve your sales and marketing efforts going forward. The more you know about your audience, the more effectively you can market to them, and the more sales you’ll drive. In that way, CRMs can directly contribute to earning you more revenue.
How CRMs unite sales and marketing
We’ve established that a CRM can help improve your sales and marketing efforts individually. But CRMs can do more than that—they can also help bring your sales and marketing teams together and get them on the same page. We’re about to cover some of the main ways they do this.
Here’s an overview of how CRMs unite sales and marketing teams at companies like yours!
1. CRMs prevent data silos
One of the first benefits of sales and marketing CRMs is that they help prevent data silos. What are data silos, you ask? Data silos are where different teams gather different data but don’t share it, leading to all involved teams having limited information.
Data silos are a problem because they restrict what your teams are able to accomplish. If your marketing team learns one piece of data and your sales team learns another, they can each benefit from their own data. But if they share data, both teams benefit from both pieces of data.
Thankfully, CRMs can help with that, because both teams can access them. Anytime one team acquires a new piece of data, they’ll input it straight into the CRM, meaning the other team can view it as well.
2. CRMs reduce duplicate efforts
Another way CRMs unite marketing and sales teams is by preventing them from duplicating each other’s efforts.
Both teams are constantly working to reach customers in new and effective ways. But the last thing you want is for them both to try the same tactic. The marketing team could have the idea to try a new form of email marketing, but if the sales team is already doing that, it becomes redundant.
CRMs, however, allow both teams to view the marketing efforts being used to reach different segments of your audience. That means each team can see if the other is already doing something, allowing them to avoid needlessly repeating it.
3. CRMs improve inter-team communication
When running a sales or marketing campaign, it’s vital to recognize that each client requires their own approach. You won’t necessarily communicate with one client in the exact same way as another—you’ll use different tactics depending on each client’s need.
You learn how to market to each lead as you progress through your relationship with them. However, you’ll learn much faster if both your marketing team and your sales team are on the same page. When one team learns insights, they can share them with the other team, and both teams can improve their process.
This doesn’t just go for how to approach certain clients. CRMs can help your two teams communicate better on all facets of your customer data, since they’ll both have access to the same information there.
4. CRMs improve data analytics
A big part of some CRMs is their data analytics capabilities, helping you visualize patterns and trends across your customer data. The thing is, your analytics reports are only as helpful as the data you put into them. The more information your analytics tools have to work with, the more insightful they’ll be.
That’s why you can benefit from having both teams sharing a single platform, which is just what you get with a CRM. Your sales team will input data alongside your marketing team, and with both sets of data feeding into the analytics section of the platform, it will be able to generate far more in-depth reports.
That will allow you to learn much more about your customer base and market to them more effectively, generating more revenue.
5. CRMs help streamline client transitions between teams
Finally, marketing and sales CRMs are helpful because they make it far easier to facilitate the process of transitioning a prospect from the marketing team to the sales team. Whenever you work on converting a lead, there’s a point where the marketing team will pass on the lead to the sales team.
Obviously, it’s not as black-and-white as that—there’s no defined point where one team stops and the other begins. But it’s definitely true that as a lead moves to the bottom of the funnel, the marketing team will take a less active role, and the sales team will take a more active one.
Using a CRM to link the two teams will make this transition much smoother and more consistent, since both teams can easily see exactly where any given lead is in the sales funnel. That means prospects never experience any duplicate messages or interruptions in their interactions with your business.
Choose Nutshell as your sales and marketing CRM
Looking for the perfect sales and marketing CRM for your business? Look no further than Nutshell. Nutshell is the optimal CRM for companies like yours, taking a client-first approach that gives you constant access to a top-tier customer service team that can help you through any obstacle.Our CRM is exactly what you need to help you unite marketing and sales efforts at your company. Of course, we know you may not want to jump right in without testing out Nutshell first, which is why we offer a free 14-day trial!
