The Problems Between Sales and Marketing
It’s well known that the marketing and sales departments in the same company have a difficult relationship. While marketing is required to produce good-quality content and attract and nurture leads, sales is required to close those leads. Each blames the other if no new leads are generated or they don’t come to fruition.
Many of the issues occur because of a lack of visibility, poor communication and an inability to track leads effectively. Dynamics 365 has a range of features which can be used by the marketing team, which we believe can bridge the gap between sales and marketing.
Tracking the Customer Journey
Dynamics 365 tracks and monitors the customer journey. When a marketing email is sent it checks if it’s been opened and if the reader then visits your website, it notes how much time they spend there and what information they look at.
Using this intelligence, you can then deliver personalised content at exactly the right time, so the marketers can proactively nurture each lead until it’s ready to pass on for sales to take further.
As the information is viewable by both the sales and marketing teams, collaborative working is encouraged, allowing them to decide together on what’s working and what’s not, and when a lead is ‘warm’ enough for sales to take over.
Automating Marketing Functions
Dynamics 365 for marketing enables organisations to automate several marketing activities, including the creation of professional-looking email campaigns and bespoke landing pages to attract leads, as well as the options to build customer profiles, analyse web forensics and more.
All the tools needed to create marketing materials are provided and are easy to use, so marketing can spend more time analysing customer interests and use the data to inform future marketing activities.
With this knowledge, the sales team benefit by having to hand the relevant information they know the customer wants before they call them, helping to build rapport and develop a good working relationship.
Real-Time Analytics
Customer information is securely shared between sales and marketing departments to encourage collaborative working and all marketing activity is tracked in real-time to better understand customer behaviour.
Leads are scored using a flexible scoring model which is based on a customer’s behaviour and used to determine sales readiness. All the data collected is available to view in a dashboard and reports filled with detailed information can easily be generated.
LinkedIn Integration
Dynamics 365 for marketing connects to LinkedIn Lead Gen, which enables the user to see how people interact with their marketing initiatives within the platform. It then collects data on leads and relays it back to the dashboard.
Conclusion
Dynamics 365 for marketing is possibly the perfect software system to get sales and marketing to work together consistently, even when things are difficult. However, although it encourages more collaboration, the users of the tool need to be willing to work together.
The key is for sales and marketing to be seen as one team rather than two separate departments with different objectives, because their goal is the same – to generate more business – it’s only the way they achieve that goal which is different.
Rather than focusing on different targets, they should both aim for the end goal. This focus and a desire to work together and support each other is the key to collaboration, and Dynamics 365 is the right choice to enhance that working relationship.
For more information on how CBIZ can help integrate sales and marketing, contact us to discuss your requirements and we’ll be happy to help.