We know that the two pillars of every successful business are marketing and sales departments. It is crucially important for both of these teams to be productive. However, these two do not always get along and sometimes end up in an interdepartmental war. Sales department often believes that marketers are not producing enough high-quality leads, while marketing is convinced the sales department ignores marketing leads for no apparent reason. Indeed, the sales departments tend to leave out a lot of perspective leads that are proposed by marketing teams. In result, 79% of those that do get through never end up being closed. Simply put, each group is often skeptical about the other’s contributions. Competition between these two vital forces may entail big problems for the company. As a result of misalignment, the company’s sales revenues go down; time mismanagement leads to unjustified internal costs and a disharmonious atmosphere increases tension for employees.
One way to resolve the problem and achieve more transparent and structured results is clever alignment of the two teams and their better communication. Installation of a cutting-edge sales and marketing automation is bound to optimize your business in establishing close cooperation between these two core departments. Powerful software, like the one you can find on www.bpmonline.com, is able to double and even triple your profits, which is no small deal.
Sales and Marketing Automation for Better Prospecting
Business is all about catering to the needs of your client. However, half of the sales representatives often lose valuable time in inefficient prospecting. The first and foremost thing to do is to get a better understanding of your target audience, which may be done if equipped with an excellent automation program that helps you amass information and gives you a clear view of your client’s profile. Now you can easily track not only basic customer information like their personal data and contacts, but enrich your search with career history, communication and business patterns, connections and much more. Digital sales and marketing tools enable you to even extract information from social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, to complete your potential customer’s profile. Being able to pool information from various sources and store them in one place is, therefore, a wonderful timesaving solution for sales teams.
Turning Anonymous Online Buyers into Patrons
By focusing solely on the sales department, the majority of B2B companies feel they underuse the potential of their software. The same procedure we described in first paragraph. While web tracking and analytics may be an excellent way of attracting new clients and developing customized marketing strategies, your marketing team needs sophisticated automated tools to make the work quick and easy. Sale and marketing automation, such as bpm online, provides instruments to build a profile of your potential clients by analyzing the whole cycle of his or her web behavior, from the initial clicking on your web-page to analyzing the time, number and frequency of browsing your company’s website, his or her activity, data submitted, the relevance of web content, etc. It is also a good idea to encourage users to fill out forms and participate in online polls, so that marketers can gather as much useful information as possible. By sorting and processing any amount of data in a quick and efficient manner, automated platforms are a great way for marketing departments to save time and focus on most effective strategies.
Sales and Marketing Automation as a Fun Way of Business Communication
As mentioned above, lack of understanding of each other’s function is the biggest stumbling block for marketing and sales departments. It is not enough for these two units to just coexist – for the sake of your business’ success, it is imperative that you motivate them to work together to create value for the company and for its customers. It is crucial to build a productive dialogue, and this is where sales and marketing automation solutions come in. One possible option is a single web platform that allows your employees to be interactive, share progress and build on each other’s success. Bpm online, for instance, offers Enterprise Social Network (ESN) that looks and feels just like Facebook: colleagues from different business units can post, share, comment and like content, thus engaging in real teamwork and satisfying the urge to sneak and check their everyday social network feed.
It is important to remember that good marketing turns into high sales and sales and marketing automation platforms are a great help for aligning these often-competing departments. Digital experience helps to boost productivity and encourage engagement and teamwork in a game-like easy environment, while generating more profit for the company. Better-motivated staff helps employers to:
- abate and avoid conflicts
- work in close alignment
- establish a cooperative environment and much more.
Statistics show that companies that deploy high-quality automatic platforms are better at keeping their customers loyal (36%), generating sales (38%) and successfully closing deals (67%).