You don’t have to look far online to find funny jokes, memes, and videos about the constant battle between sales and marketing teams. You may even be able to find a real-life example of these challenges within your organization.
Sales and marketing teams focus on lead generation, increasing revenue, and –ultimately—growing the business. So why are they so at odds?
A large part of the answer comes down to leads. Marketing works its magic to create content, events, and email nurture tracks designed to find relevant leads. Then they route these leads into their marketing automation system via a call to action (CTA) like a landing page or form and qualify them based on lead scoring models. Qualified leads are then passed to sales to work their magic and continue the conversation.
Often, though, sales doesn’t believe the leads are high quality enough to follow up on. Or they think marketing should be delivering more leads or better leads.
This is especially troublesome if marketers and salespeople work off different KPIs and goals. If marketing teams are only incentivized by the number of leads they produce and not those that convert to sales-qualified leads (SQLs), for example, what is their incentive to ensure lead quality?
We’ve reached the conundrum. These teams must work together to 1) Agree on how they define marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and SQLs and 2) work off the same data set towards shared KPIs and goals. With one caveat, both items on this agenda can be achieved by hosting strategic sessions between team leaders and training sales and marketing teams on the resulting go-forwards. The data must be shared between groups.
Unfortunately, the data that marketing has access to from its chosen marketing automation tool and the data in the sales team’s CRM is different. So, these goals end up being drastically different, and we’re back at square one.
The solution? A sales and marketing platform that aligns sales and marketing teams with robust data sharing, task workflows for sales follow-ups, and shared reporting modules.
The SugarCRM platform gives marketers and salespeople (along with customer service teams), the ability to get the information they need, when they need it—without roadblocks.
By combining Sugar Market and Sugar Sell, marketing mavericks and modern sales warriors can easily sync and report on sales and marketing data, including (but not limited to):
- Predictive lead scoring
- Subscription settings
- Account information
- Custom fields / dropdowns
- Campaign data
- Sales follow-up tasks (workflows)
- Leads from landing pages and forms
- Event registrations
- Opportunities data
- Dynamic distribution lists
- Email sends, opens, and clicks
When teams leverage and report on the same lead and opportunities data, they have the tools they need to work better together.
Ready to align your sales and marketing teams? Reach out to your customer success manager today.
