According to research conducted by Aberdeen, properly coordinated sales and marketing teams show a 400% higher annual growth compared to other teams. Marketing and sales are two major revenue drivers for a company. If a company was a human organism, marketing would be the brain, while sales would be the heart. Marketers build fame while the sales teams gain trust and loyalty. These two departments are interrelated, yet function separately. Misalignments between sales and marketing result in poor strategy execution and frustration.

This article will reveal the five steps which align sales & marketing teams and also explain how CRM could streamline communication across both teams to drive better results to your business. Getting sales and marketing teams to work together is the utmost importance for every business owner.

Step 1. Define Company Strategy & Goals

45% of businesses work without a clear digital strategy which means they don’t fully recognize their competitors, users or market share. Both the sales and marketing departments aim for company growth but they use different means. Sales teams do monthly revenue plans and usually set up short term goals that drive immediate results. The marketing teams build an evergreen pipeline of quality leads that won’t be affected by season, holidays or any other external factors. And their relationships directly affect your marketing strategy:

The company leader should define one revenue plan for the company, while the marketing team with the assistance of sales should create buyer personas to help both teams speak the same language.

Step 2. Develop Common Language

When it comes to basic department needs, speaking the same language directly affects both marketing and sales efforts. Marketing should provide the sales team with full information on the channel where the leads have interacted with the product, and the touchpoints they’ve had. Hence, the sales team would provide potential buyers with a truly tailored experience.

Sharing information between the marketing and sales teams should be done in a common space. This communication chain will allow both teams to stay on the same page by organizing data about marketing channels, leads and navigate through tons of information.

The catalyst that will align the sales and marketing team could be the CRM software. Integrating the CRM system will enable both teams to work with the same data, share updates and create comprehensive reports. Perfectly organized data would improve customer service and increase the number of loyal users.

Step 3. Integrate CRM System

CRM helps the marketing and sales team store optimization and feedback loops, see the top-performing digital channels and is a better way to communicate with the customer. If your team works primarily from Gmail, you could start with the Gmail integrated CRM.

The Gmail CRM can work in the form of a Chrome extension in your Gmail account and is the perfect place to keep all your correspondence in one place. CRM for Gmail is a software which is fully integrated into your account after installation. It helps sales and marketing team to manage your pipelines, centralize your communication & send tailored bulk emails to customers.

Sales teams сan keep customer records in one place using Gmail CRM. This workflow automation helps reduce up to 40% manual work and helps dedicate more time to customers, and less time to routine. CRM also helps evaluate the deals at an earlier stage and also withdraws from inefficient ones at an early stage of the sales process. Sales reps can set up reminders and schedule follow-ups to support efficient communication with their customer.

To marketers, Gmail-integrated CRM is a source of deep insights into customer behavior. By analyzing the workflow, they can dig deeper and find the downsides of their strategies, discover customer pain points and re-think their strategies way before it’s too late.

The Marketing team, on the other hand, can get deep insights into the best-performing marketing channels, customer behavior, and user journey. Gmail CRM software is fundamental to your company strategy but is useless if a strategy hasn’t been thought out yet. CRM is a handy tool for nurturing your customer relations, automating your work routine and keeping track of your inbox so you never lose a single incoming email again.

One of the most popular solutions for small and mid-size companies is NetHunt CRM. It is easy-to-use software which can be integrated into your Gmail account. According to G2Crowd reviews, NetHunt is proven to be one of the most popular and trusted CRM solutions for both marketing team and sales department.

We needed an easy solution to use in our sales and marketing departments and found that the NetHunt Gmail integrated CRM worked best for us. The pricing plan is more than affordable, and the support team is just amazing! They helped us to fully integrate CRM in just 2 Skype sessions.
NetHunt tracks performance and keeps all the info about closed deals and revenue. It has been perfect for us so far.
— Nina Bohush, Digital Marketer on G2Crowd

Aside from the CRM, you need to invest some time in building trustworthy relationships between sales and marketing departments that will impact your future revenue.

Develop Customer Personas

Customer personas can be a powerful source of revenue if defined right. Precise customer personas help you tailor your messages and communication, acquiring new customers much easier.

If you’re struggling with conversions, re-evaluate your target market with the help of the marketing and sales team. Build buyer persona based on data from different sources, including:

  • Independent surveys: conduct both external and internal surveys and gain insights from existing customers and prospects you have yet to reach.
  • Google Analytics: examine search terms, different behavior patterns and best-performing traffic sources.
  • CRM data: dive deep into your CRM reports with the customer profiles and examine their title, industries and more. Even basic research will help you understand and reveal new insights on buyer personas.

Collaborate in Meetings

Meetings are a crucial part of the sales and marketing synchronization process. With clear, measurable and achievable goals sales and marketing could work better together. Don’t keep them too general: clarify the most compelling issues, like downsides and breaches in sales funnel, marketing lead quality and sales process optimization.
Based on CRM data, you can also evaluate the best-performing source and relocate marketing budgets to acquire quality leads.

Get Sales Involved in Content Creation

This may sound strange to someone who isn’t used to cross-department cooperation. Involving sales team in content creation is imperative for companies who want to speak a common language with their customers.

Helping the marketing team with appropriate messages has a long-term effect: relevant content results in relevant leads. Invest some time in content creation with the sales reps and it will be returned to them with dividends of qualified leads: sales will be able to decrease time on speaking to the irrelevant prospects.

Here are the essential questions marketing team could ask sales reps:

  1. Name frequently asked questions that you would like a piece of content around.
  2. Which are 3 major complaints from customers?
  3. What do customers love most in our product/service?

Facilitate Sharing and Communication

Regular communication is essential for marketing and sales to work together with maximum productivity. Quick feedbacks and the instant reach to anyone from your company help you oversee miscommunication and moderate the dialogue of different teams, keeping the daily processes as transparent as possible.

The most efficient ways to stay in the context of business-related communication are as follows:

1. Team collaboration tools. In the vast variety of collaboration tools to boost team productivity, you should choose the one which is accessible not just from a desktop, but also from mobile devices. Our top list of such tools includes Slack, Trello, Telegram, and Basecamp. You can see the extensive list of team collaboration tools here.

2. Small out-of-office parties. Sometimes the pressure of work can be overwhelming. Little parties are perfect to lift up the team mood, relax and be themselves, while also creating new bonds that extend inside the workplace.

3. Good news monthly gatherings. A meeting shouldn’t always be stress. You may turn them into self-praising and success sharing gathering. By this, you will encourage the most prominent workers by publicly acknowledging their impact into the company growth, elevate the team spirit and develop a good office vibe.

Step 4. Measure & Evaluate

Choosing the metrics to track is the first step to measure your CRM return on investment. Sometimes, in the rush for pro-features, you might forget that you only have a small company of ten people who won’t use it in their daily routine. Start small: define the vital stats to track and add new metrics as your company evolves.

CRM systems utilize the variety of performance metrics which help the sales & marketing teams optimize their activity. After integrating the CRM software, you don’t need any complicated metrics to track. Start with the basic performance indicators and move on to more complicated ones as your company grows.

This list of basic СRM metrics will help you get insights on what’s working and what’s not, in order to further optimize your activity:

Conversion rate shows the number of conversions in relation to the total number of visitors. According to CRM, it’s the number of leads who converted into clients. See how it looks in NetHunt CRM:

Customer Retention Rate is the percentage of loyal customers a company has retained over a certain period of time in your CRM. Keeping up with the great relationships between existing customers can cost you 7x less than customer acquisition.

Churn Rate the percentage of clients that your company lost over a certain time period.

Winback Rate shows the percentage of bounced or inactive customers, who purchased your product/service over a certain period of time. To keep the winback rate high, use remarketing in your ad campaigns and offer inactive customers bonuses or discounts in your emails.

The team lead can also find useful performance metrics to track the efficiency of the sales team:

  • The number of emails sent helps you evaluate the sales activity over a given time period.
  • Email open rate is the percentage of your email list subscribers who opened an email campaign. You can easily schedule email campaigns and follow-ups in your Gmail CRM, which is proven to show a higher open rate than a third-party solution outside of Gmail.
  • The number of new contacts added weekly/monthly. A growing user base is crucial for company evolution. CRM helps understand the dynamics of the user base and avoids duplicates.
  • The number of monthly deals closed shows how many new deals salespeople close in a month and shows the revenue generated. We all know the end-of-month time crunch, when the sales team is rushing to close as many deals as possible. CRM software helps evaluate these deals and calculates the win rate.

Step 5. Review & Improve

According to a recent study, CRM helps to improve productivity by 50%, while sales productivity improves by 65%. The myth of the complexity of the Gmail CRM adoption will vanish as soon as you start implementing it to align your sales & marketing teams.

If you aim to improve your revenue by 20%, your marketing team should work on the acquisition channels. While the sales team needs to either increase the average check, or close more deals. The relevant metrics then would be conversion rate, deal size and more.

Gmail CRM software automates the daily routine, reduces manual work, and keeps all the massive data organized. Start small: download the Gmail CRM Chrome extension and use it for business goals.
The sales team can benefit from perfectly organized customer records stored inside the Gmail inbox: client profiles, all deals, email tracking, easy bulk email campaign setup, and much more. The marketing team can use free G Suite CRM to improve their marketing strategy, re-think marketing channels and drive quality leads to the sales team.

According to Capterra, 24% of users consider CRM functionality the most valuable factor in their purchasing decision. NetHunt CRM for Gmail brings extensive customization capabilities to your workflow: you can adjust every CRM aspect to your specific business needs and be sure that our support team will help you on every stage of the CRM integration.

Competitive strategy combined with powerful and easy-to-use CRM helps you improve the relationship between sales and marketing and minimizes the risk of losing track of leads. “Implement, tailor, test, measure and repeat“ is the golden rule for every company aimed at becoming an industry game-changer. Working together, sales and marketing can achieve new heights and hit business goals faster.

Eager to learn more about NetHunt CRM? Discover the full list of NetHunt CRM features for your business or schedule a demo with our team to find out more!

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