Despite its crucial importance, many companies struggle to get their sales and marketing teams to work efficiently and collaboratively together. The common narrative is that marketers work endlessly creating spreadsheets with hundreds of leads for the sales team, only to get frustrated that no one follows up with any of them. On the other hand, the sales team often struggles to understand what the marketing team actually does which leads to frustration when they do not hit their target. Too often it seems like the two teams are pulling in opposite directions, existing in completely separate siloes. Does a solution exist?
A New Approach
Marketing and sales departments must work more closely than ever before if they want to maximize effectiveness in today’s omnichannel world. Rather than separating into silos, the two teams must learn to synchronize, enabling each other to perform their best with data-driven insights. One key way to accomplish this is implementing modern tools, such as Dynamics 365 paired with ClickDimensions, to create one unified platform that both teams can work on.
The ClickDimensions marketing platform, natively built within Microsoft Dynamics, offers a single unified marketing, analytics and services platform. In lieu of marketing and sales using two different systems, they can now both work on one platform with separate areas for each team. All the while, one common database of information is being created. Because marketing and sales typically have used separate systems when executing their functions, CRM tools and digital marketing platforms have not historically integrated well together. These modern tools, however, not only integrate well together but perform exceptionally together. When using one unified platform, substantial effects and results follow.
The Benefits
Marketing Becomes an Ally
By having your marketing and sales teams working together on one platform, such as Dynamics 365 paired with ClickDimensions, valuable changes occur. The first of which is that sales will begin to see marketing as a true lead generation partner. This occurs because they finally get visibility and usage of all the data that the marketing team works to gather, such as email history, email interaction, web traffic behaviors, responses, etc. For example, when marketing gets a lead, they pull information over time about the individual and collect data about their web traffic patterns. With one shared platform that collects collaborative data, the sales team can follow up with these leads based on the data they now have access to on which areas of the website the person engaged with. The sales team benefits significantly from being able to understand the engagement level of a lead, and views the marketing team as an ally in the process.
Instrumental Data Accumulated
The second change that can occur when implementing a one-system approach to marketing and sales is that it allows marketers to understand historical sales and service data to use in marketing
campaigns. This leads to the marketing team being able to market to leads on behalf of sales. In addition, the marketing team will have a greater amount of essential customer data at their
fingertips. For example, with the ability to easily see data gathered from the sales team, the marketing team can develop and send a campaign message to customers who have purchased a
particular product or service in the past, who have had a particular issue in the past with a product, etc. The key change, however, is that the marketing team no longer has to collect this data. The data is now readily available for them to pull and use at the glance of a dashboard.
Application of AI
Lastly, the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of Dynamics 365 paired with ClickDimensions are of great value. The system is able to apply AI to understand the likelihood of closing a sale.
The marketing and sales team can now get a view of the current “health” of their relationship with a customer or lead through Relationship Insights, which uses sentiment analysis to check on the likelihood of a deal closing and what actions should be taken to accomplish this. How is this possible? It digs through all of your interactions, notes and activities for keywords (such as meetings, phone calls, emails) along with the number of activities to assign to a score. Your teams can then use this score to obtain a view of which relationships are healthy and which relationships need additional attention.
Aligning and Transitioning
If you are a marketing or sales leader who would like to create a more efficient process of aligning both teams, modern solutions are available to you. Dynamics 365 paired with ClickDimensions is a top-rated, Microsoft-certified marketing and CRM platform that creates a seamless user experience while ensuring that sales and marketing are working together within the same system. Breaking down the sales and marketing siloes is more attainable than ever.
