Wondering how your CRM strategy aligns your marketing and sales strategy? Recently we shared some tips on how a CRM can help your marketing strategy. Today, we’re taking a closer look at how this tool can help you bridge the gap between marketing and sales.
Essential Steps to Align Your Marketing and Sales Strategy
One of the many benefits of a CRM is that it allows you to attract leads, nurture them, and ultimately convert those leads. Although your marketing and sales teams have the same goal, these teams often have a very different approach. A CRM platform can help you keep everyone on the same page, so that you get full value. When it comes to your sales strategy, there are a few important stages – attract, nurture, sell and win. Your marketing team focuses on the first two steps, attracting and nurturing new leads. Your sales team then take over to seal the deal, focusing their efforts on selling to opportunities, and winning customers.
How does your CRM ensure that all of these stages align? Let’s take a look.
Understanding the role that each team plays will help you see just how much value a CRM can bring, across the board. Some of the most important steps within each phase include the following:
Phase 1: Attract
The initial customer journey begins when they connect with your business. This could be through any number of channels – website, PPC ad or even social media. The first stage focuses on engaging these potential leads to encourage them to interact on a deeper level. You may have free downloads to offer, or a special deal for newcomers. Once these leads have been identified, they will go from being a random visitor to a potential lead. This is where the CRM comes into play. Using this tool, your marketing team will be able to connect activity from potential leads to turn them into a genuine lead.
Phase 2: Nurture Leads
From this point, your marketing team aim to nurture leads until they are ready for your sales team. Your CRM can track all the important information that helps marketing find out as much about each lead as possible. Information is provided through blog posts, newsletters, surveys, reports, articles, social media and even mobile marketing. Every engagement type is scored, with the most meaningful engagement being scored the highest. This allows marketing to hand over only leads that are more likely to convert.
Phase 3: Sell to Opportunities
Thanks to your CRM and marketing team, sales is only provided with warm leads. These leads are now opportunities that can be followed up on by sales. A good CRM allows you to track the sales pipeline so that your sales team is able to get a clearer picture of opportunities that will hopefully turn into customers.
Phase 4: Win Customers
At this stage, opportunities either convert to sales, or they are lost. The aim of this phase however is to encourage lifetime customers. Customer service plays an important role in this phase, which is where your CRM really starts to shine. Because you have all the important customer data in a central, easily accessible platform, it will become a lot easier to up-sell and cross-sell.
As you can see, your CRM Strategy has the power to align your teams, in order to give you the best possible results from your marketing and sales strategy.
