The key to aligning your team
A CRM is the bread and butter of any B2B business. It’s a household staple and sure, 91% of businesses already have one. But, the real question is, are they using it efficiently?
At its core, your CRM is a database designed to hold information that can be used to track your business activity. It gives visibility to the journey a brand has taken from being just one of many marketing-qualified leads right through to becoming one of your best clients. Your CRM can even offer access to every single touch point the account has had with your business to reach this status. It allows for easy reporting on both marketing activity and sales outreach, and, when used properly, can become the single source of truth to monitoring your business success.
But, knowing your successes and failures is worth nothing if you don’t act on this information.
To continue to grow as a business, sales and marketing teams need to feed off each other to help improve their own work. Aka, a term we love at Punch!, your CRM = the key to sales and marketing alignment.
Using a CRM properly dramatically simplifies processes. The more teams work together on one tool, the less upskilling is required. So, it's worth investing the time to align sales and marketing and learn the benefits of how to utilise your CRM.
How can Marketing play its part?
Marketing teams should be linking the CRM to all of their content production, i.e. blog posts, gated form fills, social content, newsletters, etc. Information on contacts who are interacting with said content will automatically update in the CRM, and it gives the sales team the quickest chance to follow up on a lead.
SDRs can then get great detail on who is opening newsletters, interacting with the content shared and how much time they are spending on a page. Using this information, they can follow up with a more personalised approach, by recommending other content that the prospect might take interest in, or offering to have a chat about X problem they might be facing.
Linking this ensures that marketing efforts aren’t being wasted. Likewise, all the information that sales gain in terms of where their leads are coming from is also helpful so that marketing can prioritise activity that works.
Marketing can also use the data from this content to influence what areas of marketing are performing better than others. Your CRM will give you insight into what content has the most CTR, time spent on the page, and overall performance.
Following this, a good recommendation would be to try and build your martech stack around your CRM.
HubSpot, our partner CRM platform, connects with 1,000s of different technologies that constantly feed into contact data. “By connecting your different tools to HubSpot, your marketing and sales team have a holistic view of how contacts are engaging with you, making it easier to gain an understanding of both team's performance and enable you to make data driven decisions”. - Pepe Reig, Senior Channel Consultant @ Hubspot
The buyer's journey hops from multiple different touch-points, so knowing as many interactions your prospects have across your tech platforms will help your sales team navigate how warm a lead they are.
Another way marketing can utilise its CRM is by automating repetitive tasks. Task reminders can prove useful when a field is changed on an account, and action is required off the back of it. For example, once an account has been moved to ‘deal won’, a notification can automatically be sent to an account handler, reminding them to send an onboarding pack.
What should sales teams be doing?
Sales team leaders should train their sales development team on how to use a CRM properly. This extends further than looking at call lists.
Build a structure that is easy to follow, and also gives access to marketing data such as website visitors. Educate the team as to where they should be looking for these data lists, to increase results. SDR teams need to be told what to look for and where to find it, this is where proper CRM training for your SDRs is crucial.
The ability for sales teams to tag data sources is a great way of allowing for higher personalisation.
Tagging where a piece of data has come from means you can segment the data and target different data lists with its own messaging. It also means SDRs can base outreach methods where it's most likely to be received. Tagging accounts that open LinkedIn messages more frequently than emails gives the best chance to reach out and get a response, again tailoring your efforts to suit the prospect.
Take advantage of what information your CRM will gather for you. Hubspot gives generic business insights such as head office size, or turnover. This can allow you to refine your data and focus your outreach on accounts that fit within your TAM.
Finally, as mentioned previously, at its core your CRM is a database, and so it is there to hold information. The more notes left by the sales development team, the easier it becomes for SDRs to follow up with accounts, and more information = stronger interactions, leading to a better chance of closing a pipeline account.
These notes can be used to keep track of any information on the prospect, such as what they are like on calls, when is their birthday, and what is the best way to reach out to them. All of this visibility helps build a relationship that can then be used when booking a meeting, trying to close the account, and right through to customer service teams who are onboarding the client and trying to learn about them. A solid piece of advice is: take as many notes as possible.
All in all, knowledge is power, and the more teams working across the same system, the more data, knowledge, and alignment you will achieve. This will achieve better results, happier customers and happier employees! If you would like to learn more about why your sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned, click here.
