Modern sales teams are more aligned with their marketing departments than their predecessors.
But some organizations still struggle to make the transition. The sales and marketing teams have the same goal – bring in new customers – but they aren’t working in tandem.
A sales activity management system allows sales and marketing to align on what matters most: their day-to-day actions. Instead of working in silos, the system provides the transparency and focus they need to function collaboratively. Here’s how.
3 Ways Sales Activity Management Systems Align Sales and Marketing
1. Sales activity management creates transparency.
The software uses your CRM data to track daily activities in real time. Sales leaders can see whether enough leads are coming into the pipeline and where they are getting stuck. The bottlenecks are clear.
If sales doesn’t have enough leads to convert into opportunities, marketing can help generate leads. If marketing sends more than enough leads to sales, but no one is calling them, the real-time activity data will make that clear. When the data shows that opportunities get lost at the discovery stage of the funnel; sales leaders can coach reps around providing use cases and ROI calculations. Marketing can create collateral like case studies and discovery questions.
With transparency from sales activity management systems, you can optimize every stage of the sales process.
2. Sales activity management drives focus.
Sales activity management data enables visibility into whether team members are performing the right activities.
Salespeople are busy. They often get distracted from the day-to-day noise of answering emails, handling admin tasks and responding to support requests. But the system keeps the 3-4 most critical activity metrics front and center for each team member.
By reverse engineering your sales process, you can calculate exactly how much of each activity is needed: Marketing knows how many leads they must generate; sales understands the number of marketing leads they should follow up with to reach their quota.
Reps stop guessing on where to spend their time with personal scorecards. The system even alerts them when they fall behind pace. This drives focus on the activities that you know create a recipe for closing business.
3. Sales activity management rallies teams around key initiatives.
Sales and marketing should operate as a single team with different initiatives. When one part of the team is struggling, the others come to its aid. Sales activity management systems streamline this process.
Leaders can quickly rally the teams around specific activities through the increased visibility and motivation that come with sales activity management. If marketing needs more leads, sales could create a contest in the system around writing blog posts for SEO. When calls for the month are below pace, sales can use the system to host a spiff for marketing to assist them in calling leads.
The best part? This type of teamwork helps alignment around metric and growth goals, but it also helps create a collaborative, performance-driven culture.
Sales and marketing alignment is vital in the modern sales team. Sales activity management systems help you achieve it.
