Ask athletes about the toughest races they’ve ever faced, and most will remember a relay. What makes a relay race so much more challenging than a solo effort is the hand-off. Every team member has to be fast enough to contribute to the team and sharp enough to make the switch from one racer to the next as effortless as possible.
Success in business depends on a team effort to bring home the gold too, and the hand-off between sales and marketing is critical to earning the win. Integrating your sales and marketing tech by centralizing your database is a key part of account-based marketing. Here’s how to integrate sales with marketing for seamless lead gen and development every step of the way.
Smoother Transitions from Marketing to Sales
Marketers need to know when leads are truly sales-ready to ensure a smooth transfer to the sales team. Act too quickly, and you send them green leads who still need more nurturing; wait too long, and you risk losing a prospect to a competitor who’s quicker to respond. Integrating your sales team’s CRM data with your marketing automation platform lets leads make the transition from marketing to sales without feeling under-informed or ignored.
Rapid Alert System
When swimmers dive in for their leg of a relay, they can see and anticipate the other swimmer coming in. Their split-second timing can mean the difference between standing on the medal podium and watching from the audience. For marketers and sellers, excellent timing is also vital to making a sale. Fully integrated marketing automation systems let you set alerts that instantly communicate to the sales team when a lead takes a given action.
For example, historical data might show a strong correlation between downloading an e-book and making a purchase within the next month. When a prospect downloads your latest e-book, a seller gets an alert message and can anticipate the newly sales-ready lead by studying up on the account and preparing for contact.
Set Lead Scoring Rules
Alerts are useful for certain strong buying signals, but many buying decisions happen after a series of far subtler cues. Lead scoring programs use these demographic, firmographic, and behavioral hints to put together an accurate picture of prospects’ sales-readiness, but how do you know which signals are relevant? The answers are in the data – specifically, your historical sales data combined with marketing analytics. When sales and marketing data are integrated, you can build a detailed set of rules to govern your lead scoring strategy.
Ready, Set, Synchronize
A great hand-off in a relay race involves both athletes reaching the same speed at just the right time and in the right place. Synchronizing data between your CRM and your marketing automation platform lets you update records in real time to ensure a perfect transition. From marketing to sales to service, you have all the data in front of you to provide complete customer care.
Integration is the key to winning the lead gen race. Retain more high-quality leads, provide better lead nurture programs, and make more sales when you have everyone in your company on the same track.
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