Many professionals are currently operating in a distributed work environment, even when working on the same project in the same office, sales and marketing misalignment is common. Their teams often may have different goals and KPIs, use different platforms to create separate sets of data.
But it is an outdated approach that takes a profit away. The potential misalignment between sales and marketing is multiplied day by day. This can lead to costly duplicative work, lost opportunities, and wasted time red tape when you can least afford it.
Ideally, sales and marketing colleagues should use the same solution, so that they can benefit from each other’s data and insights.
Organizations that proactively align sales and marketing can expect great positive changes. These include a more consistent, seamless experience for their customers, lower customer acquisition costs, less administrative work, and the ability to capture data that spans the entire marketing and sales pipeline. You can find more data that provides the clearest and most actionable insights to find out how companies can reach their KPI.
The evolving buying process
If we talk about B2B, we should mention that buying decisions are often made by teams, with different players and roles involved in different phases of the buying process. This means that sales and marketing must use their combined insights and knowledge to connect with a wide range of roles in their customers’ organizations.
Most B2B buyers lean heavily on digital assets to educate themselves about companies and solutions. Digital selling requires salespeople to understand customers at every point of their buying journey and offer highly personalized and relevant content. Thus, sales need to be familiar with acquisition and nurture content produced by marketing. With these two principles, companies reduce costs and efforts tied to customer acquisition.
Reducing the cost of customer acquisition
Sales and marketing in organizations both invest in understanding their customers, but these divisions rarely share the information with each other in an effective way. Data usually coexist without any interaction.
Marketing focuses more on the marketplace, researching customer needs and identifying opportunities, while Sales teams are the ones who see individual customer needs first hands.
With an integrated Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution different teams can share data and insights and build a more accurate buyer profile and create a single source of information about contacts, leads, and customers to inform every interaction.
Aligning reporting to cut unnecessary expenses
Misalignment sooner or later will lead to miscommunication because marketing and sales have different responsibilities and points of view on a selling process, each is critical to the sales process. It often causes frustration on both sides. The sales team may feel marketing is making unrealistic claims about the company’s solutions, while marketing may feel sales fails to follow through on the leads marketing works so hard to surface.
With Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales, teams can align and integrate their knowledge for greater campaign impact, handle leads more fluidly and effectively, and better map and improve the customer journey.
As companies build a more data-driven model across sales and marketing, they can identify the most effective and investment worthy methods of acquiring new customers and driving repeat business.
Automating administrative work and reducing overheads
Automated solution reduces duplicative work in planning, demand management, data management, and measurement. Sales and marketing teams can identify tasks across the customer buyer journey that can be automated. It might include such tasks as answering requests for product literature, sending relevant emails, scheduling sales calls, compiling sales reports, generating proposals and bids, and entering orders.
Using Dynamics 365 as the solution to integrate sales and marketing will not only increase sales leads amount and help salespeople better understand the customer journey. It also bring together rich information streams to make more informed travel budget decisions and support better lead nurturing, faster conversion, and reduced customer acquisition costs.
