No one knows exactly where the “Sales and Marketing hate each other” trope first emerged from, but it’s definitely had staying power! Since crossing our fingers and hoping it goes away doesn’t work, how about we look at some practical steps to making sure it’s not true in your organisation? The best place to start is the platform both teams use every day: CRM.
Remind me what the R in CRM is short for?
The reason we talk about “aligning” Sales and Marketing is that they will always have different goals. This isn’t a problem to solve, but a spinoff of their function. The solution is to have a clear map of how these goals relate to each other.
“Marketing just send us rubbish leads!” is a sadly common cry from Sales teams in every industry. A properly set-up CRM deals with this by adding context; Are these “rubbish leads” clearly time-wasters from the first Sales call? Then marketing needs to address the top of the funnel. Lead looks good but you fall at the final hurdle? Then it’s a bottom-of-funnel issue. Either way, we’ve moved from a generic gripe to a diagnosed issue which can be solved.
Whose job is it to keep CRM up to date?
Both teams like to accuse the other of slacking when it comes to putting data from their activities into the “central source of truth”. We’re chipping away at this problem by making sure that all of our tools integrate with Spotler CRM, so the data inside is accurate without anyone lifting a finger!
The intermediate solution is to make sure both teams are clear on what data belongs in CRM. It’s useful to know that the decision-maker at your target company is called Angela. It makes no difference that she drives a Ford Mondeo and owns 2 cockapoos. If you’re forcing users to clog up your CRM with irrelevant data, then of course they’ll put it off until there’s absolutely nothing else they could be doing.
A CRM that works for everyone
Even if you take a very minimalist approach to what data lives in CRM, it won’t all be relevant to everyone all of the time. That’s why one of the key features of Spotler CRM is its flexibility; each team or user can set up their own view of a report. So a marketer can see which channel a lead arrived from, how many blogs they’ve read and which resources they’ve downloaded. A salesperson can see which competitors a lead uses, how previous sales calls went, and changes in the individual decision-makers. All from 1 central report!
Ready to wield the full power of CRM?
Arrange a live demo of the platform and get ready to enjoy harmony between your Sales and Marketing teams, with a little help from Spotler CRM.
