The benefits of aligning sales and marketing
When teams are misaligned, they have trouble coordinating and operating with separate information. They can then miss goals and benchmarks because of the difference between their metrics and data. The separation of solutions can put both teams at a disadvantage because each team has its own view of the picture. This leads to some difficulties such as ineffective strategies, misunderstandings and missed opportunities, all of which negatively affect customer outreach.
What happens if you work on separate processes?
Challenges that make it difficult for marketing and sales teams to work together are the result of systems and siloed processes that can prevent each team from responding to what the other team is working on.
The signs that disconnect processes are holding both teams: sales and marketing teams back such as:
Poor lead quality
Indeed, it remains difficult for sales teams to score leads with an incomplete view of how the lead has responded and how it was acquired.
Limited visibility into sales conversions
Marketing teams aren’t able to modify or adapt strategies if they don’t know which of the generated leads resulted in sales.
Inconsistent definitions
Separate processes are difficult for marketing and sales teams to work together when their definitions differ.
Incomplete views of the sales process from the beginning to the end
If marketing teams only see the beginning of the sales process, and sales teams can only see the end, collaboration to improve the process would be a challenge.
Conflicting or misaligned performance objectives
If Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are based on different data sets, they aren’t as useful to achieve your goals.
Degree of control over the brand
It can be difficult to keep branding consistent during customer interactions if you separate processes and technologies.
These challenges reduce the achievement potential and effectiveness of both teams. The solution lies in bringing sales, removing data silos and marketing together on one integrated platform. This is why it is better to simplify and streamline every aspect of the sales and marketing process by adopting Dynamics 365 for Marketing.
A powerful collection of marketing automation tools with Dynamics 365
Develop more sales-ready leads, align your sales and marketing teams, and grow your business with this adaptable solution will allow you to:
- Manage and share a source of information about contacts, leads, and customers to understand the impact of every interaction
- Favor list segmentation to target the right audience
- Point out leads who are ready to buy across different customer segments with multiple lead-scoring models
- Connect and automate marketing and sales processes, from nurture to hand-off, and track the progress of every lead in a shared database
- Make collaboration and communicate with colleagues, leads, and customers with your brand thanks to Microsoft Office 365 tools
- Simplify and streamline important business moments
- Organize and coordinate with intuitive out-of-the-box features
Launch a new product or enter a new market
Choosing between launching a new product or entering a new market are two of the most significant investments for your organization. Using multiple applications to keep track of everything make effective planning.
Make sure you add Marketing to your Dynamics 365 portfolio to maintain control over campaign flow and product launch.
Ensure elements such as landing pages and emails are consistent with content and product messaging with out-of-the-box templates. Track customer activities to trigger emails for those who express interest in services or new products, or online customers who respond from a new market. Use automation and create a list to invite prospects to register for product updates to pass those leads seamlessly to your sales team. Create several lead scoring models to automatically identify qualified leads and let your sales team guide those leads all the way to the end of the sales process.
Organize events
Webinar or in-person events are interesting to drive new leads and help close deals. You should organize and run events from start to finish with the same solution for streamlined coordination. Speakers, manage invitations, plan sessions, budgets, registration, and attendee tracking, all through one event portal. Thanks to the information you collected from attendees, you can connect information to the data. You can then measure return on investment with all your metrics after the event. As far as webinars are concerned, Marketing integrates with webinar providers like ON24 so that participant data is available for immediate post-webinar nurturing.
Manage content-based campaigns
Prospects and customers want relevant content about the products and services they’re interested in. That’s why, content is the key for marketers. Content-based assets such as whitepapers, e-books, and videos can be promoted with the Customer Journey feature. Customers and prospects can choose the content they want using subscription centers, and then Customer Journey can convert those prospects through the campaign flow, directing prospects to related content and collecting important customer information. Help your content-based assets and save time and money can make the biggest impact by automating the process of getting the right content to the right audience.
Customer’s survey
Surveys are an interesting way to gain insights from prospects and customers about services, products, and activities. In order to improve customer experiences or create compelling offers, you must collect useful information and send surveys. Include links and customize surveys that add responses directly to your customer relationship management database. These enriched contact records will enable you to gain a deeper understanding of your customer segments and send personalized communications to leads.
The advantages of aligning sales and marketing
You will get powerful results by aligning your sales and marketing teams produces. It will also bring some advantages such as a better collaboration and the optimization of the whole sales process by bringing your sales and marketing teams together on a full-featured and unified platform.
Tips to coordinate customer engagement
Prospects and customers can be frustrated because of redundant or poorly timed communications from an organization. Take email, social media, and events to the next level with the Customer Journey feature. Use out-of-the-box templates to plan and run new campaigns and get real-time visibility into prospect activities. Customized nurture programs allow to give sales and marketing a shared understanding of the buyer journey and how those journeys differ across personas and segments. These in-depth insights can be used to deliver relevant customer engagement, tailored to each prospect, and increasing the likelihood of a sale.
How to improve targeting and lead prioritization?
Batch-and-blast marketing does not work anymore. Generic, unrequested emails often lead to lost opportunities and blanket unsubscribes. New regulations can result in penalties for this type of marketing. You should modernize your approach by delivering customized and dynamic content to customers. Thanks to a behavioral understanding of contacts and detailed demographic, sales and marketing teams can have an integrated view of their prospects ID and what they’re interested in. A unified solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives you the ability to track marketing programs (social media, web, email, and ads) and sales activities in a shared database. If you list segmentation, it will let you filter contacts based on any attribute or behavior associated with those contacts, letting you target the segments with personalized content.
Get more leads and marketing-attributed revenue
Sales and marketing teams need to work together to deliver leads and convert those leads to revenue. The way revenue is attributed can vary from one organization to another, but using the right technology makes the journey from lead to sale clear. Using sophisticated web tracking marketing processes compiles all prospect data into contact records to present a complete picture of contact engagement history. As each contact progresses through the journey, all customer activities are tracked and visible to both sales and marketing teams. Gain insight into all the steps that resulted in revenue and which activities moved the meter along the way.
Optimize your marketing investment
Develop and score more sales-ready leads, automate marketing, and outreach, and collaborate using integrated Office 365 tools. An integrated collection of tools will allow you to align your sales and marketing teams by managing and improving each step of the customer journey. Whether your investments are new products, new market launches, or events, or customer surveys, Dynamics 365 for Marketing will help you to develop your activity.