<eBook> The Benefits of Aligning Sales and Marketing

Sep 21 2020
Stone Forest IT
The Benefits of Aligning Sales and Marketing

Download E-Book



Help increase the return on your marketing investments by aligning your sales and marketing teams.

Misaligned teams have trouble coordinating, operate with separate information, and miss goals and benchmarks because their metrics and data are different. Separate solutions put both teams at a disadvantage because each team only sees part of the picture. This leads to missed opportunities, miscommunications, and ineffective strategies, all of which negatively affect customer outreach.

If your organization is using separate solutions for marketing and sales, your teams aren’t getting the whole picture. Read on to learn how to empower your sales and marketing teams with a unified, integrated solution.


The trouble with separate processes.

Many of the challenges that make it difficult for sales and marketing teams to work together are the result of siloed processes and systems that prevent each team from successfully responding to what the other team is working on.

Some of the signs that disconnected processes are holding your sales and marketing teams back include:

Poor Lead Quality Limited Visibility   Inconsistent definitions
Poor lead quality

It’s difficult for sales teams to score leads with an incomplete view of how the lead was acquired, or how the lead has responded so far.

Limited visibility into sales conversions
 
Marketing teams can’t modify, replicate, or adapt strategies without knowing which of the generated leads resulted in sales. 
Inconsistent definitions

Sales and marketing teams with separate processes struggle to work together when their definitions differ. 
 Incomplete views Confliction or misalignment    Degree of control
Incomplete views of the sales process from start to finish

When marketing can only see the beginning of the sales process, and sales can only see the end, collaboration to improve the process is a challenge. 
Conflicting or misaligned performance objectives

Key performance indicators (KPI) aren’t as useful if they’re based on different data sets. 
Degree of control over the brand  

Separated processes and  technologies make it difficult to keep branding consistent during customer interactions. 

These challenges limit the effectiveness and achievement potential of both teams. The solution lies in removing data silos  and bringing sales and marketing together on one integrated platform. Streamline and simplify every aspect of the sales and marketing process by adding Dynamics 365 Marketing to your sales portfolio.


Dynamics 365 Marketing:
A powerful collection of marketing automation tools.

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Nurture more sales-ready leads, align your sales and marketing teams, and grow your business with this robust and adaptable solution. This comprehensive collection of tools helps you:

  • Securely manage and share a single (true) source of information about contacts, leads, and customers to understand how every interaction impacts results.
  • Target the right audience using list segmentation.
  • Prioritise leads who are ready to buy across different customer segments with multiple lead-scoring models.
  • Connect and automate marketing and sales processes, from nurture to hand- off, and track the progress of every lead in a shared database.
  • Make collaboration and communications with colleagues, leads, and customers easy and consistent with your brand using integrated Microsoft Office 365 tools.
  • Simplify and streamline important business moments.
  • Coordinate and organise with intuitive out-of-the-box features.

Launch a new product or enter a new market Launch a new product or enter a new market

Launching a new product or entering a new market are two of the most significant investments your organization makes. 
Multiple applications to keep track of everything make effective planning and consistent follow-through a challenge.

Maintain control over product launch and campaign flow by adding Marketing to your Dynamics 365 portfolio. Ensure emails and landing pages are consistent with product messaging and content with out-of-the-box templates, or create your own. Track web activity to trigger emails for online customers who express interest in new products or services, or who respond from a new market.

Invite prospects to register for product updates and use automation to pass those leads seamlessly to your sales team. Create multiple lead scoring models to automatically identify qualified leads and let your sales team guide those leads all the way to the end of the sales process.


Organise events

Screenshot of a event webpage

In-person and webinar events drive new leads and help close deals. Organise and run events from start to finish with the same solution for streamlined coordination. Plan sessions, speakers, and budgets, and manage invitations, registration, and attendee tracking, all through one event portal. Connect this information to the data you collect from attendees, so when your event is over, you can measure return on investment with all your metrics in one place.

For webinars, Marketing integrates with webinar providers like ON24 so that participant data is available for immediate post-webinar nurturing.


Manage content-based campaigns

Content is key for marketers. Prospects and customers want timely and relevant content about the products and services they’re interested in.

Promote content-based assets such as e-books, whitepapers, and videos with the Customer Journey feature. Prospects and customers can opt in to the content they want using subscription centers, and then Customer Journey moves those prospects through the campaign flow, collecting important customer information and directing prospects to related content.

Save time and money and help your content-based assets make the biggest impact by automating the process of getting the right content to the right customers.


Survey your customers

Survey Your Customers 

Surveys are a quick and effective way to gain insights from prospects and customers about products, services, and activities. Send surveys and collect useful information to improve customer experiences or create compelling offers.

Customise surveys and include links that add responses directly to your customer relationship management database. Gain a deeper understanding of your customer segments with these enriched contact records and use them to send personalised communications to leads.


Benefits of aligning sales and marketing.

Screenshot of the interface of Microsoft Dynamics creating a customer journeyNurture your leads with a customised experience that’s based upon engagement and events.

Aligning your sales and marketing teams produces powerful results. Facilitate collaboration and optimise the sales process from start to finish by bringing your sales and marketing teams together on a unified, full-featured platform.


Coordinate customer engagement

Redundant or poorly timed communications from an organization are frustrating and inconvenient for prospects and customers. Take web, email, social media, and events to the next level with the Customer Journey feature. Plan and run new campaigns with out-of-the-box templates and get real-time visibility into prospect activities.

Build customised nurture programs to give sales and marketing a shared understanding of the buyer journey and how those journeys differ across segments and personas. Use these in-depth insights to deliver timely, relevant customer engagement that are tailored to each prospect—increasing the likelihood of a sale.

Lead Scoring Model Setup

Improve targeting and lead prioritization

Batch-and-blast marketing is no longer an effective technique. Generic, unrequested emails often lead to blanket unsubscribes and lost opportunities, and new regulations can result in penalties for this type of marketing.

Modernise your approach and take it to the next level by delivering customised and dynamic content to customers using Sales and Marketing. With a detailed demographic and behavioral understanding of contacts, sales and marketing teams have an integrated view of who their prospects are and what they’re interested in.

A unified solution gives you the ability to track marketing programs (such as web, email, social media, and ads) and sales activities (like events, calls, and meetings) in one shared database. And list segmentation lets you filter contacts based on any attribute or behavior associated with those contacts, letting you target those focused segments with personalised content.


Get more leads and marketing- attributed revenue

Marketing and sales teams work in tandem to deliver leads and convert those leads to revenue. How revenue is attributed varies from organization to organization, but the right technology makes the journey from lead to sale clear.

Using sophisticated web tracking, Marketing compiles all prospect data into contact records to present a complete picture of contact engagement history.

As each contact progresses through the customer journey, all activities are tracked and visible to both sales and marketing teams. Gain insight into all the steps that resulted in revenue and which activities moved the meter along the way.


Optimise 
your marketing investment.

Aligning your sales and marketing teams with an integrated collection of tools that make it possible to manage and improve each step of the customer journey. Nurture and score more sales-ready leads, automate marketing and outreach, and collaborate using integrated Office 365 tools. Whether your investments are new products, new market launches, content-driven campaigns, major tradeshows or events, or customer surveys, Dynamics 365 Marketing has the features you need.


 

Get help from experts.

Stone Forest IT (SFIT) provides advisory, implementation, and managed services for Microsoft 365 and Business Applications. Our end-to-end support includes license optimisation, systems integration, e-learning, backup and more.

As a Microsoft gold partner, we have a strong track record in implementing Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 for growing businesses across industries. We value add with industry best practices and workflow advisory to maximise collaboration, productivity and efficiency.