Synergy within companies ensures that everyone is pulling in the same direction towards the same goal. Aligning the sales and marketing teams means seamlessly engaging, informing and retaining customers through content, conversation, and sales conversion. Strategies within the departments should be built on solid foundations, as marketing studies leads and sales converts leads into customers. 

On a recent AdVic “Salesforce Simplified” podcast, Fangled Tech CEO Andrew Deutsch spoke to the success that teamwork can bring to any company. 

How would you advise sales and marketing teams to go about building and executing a strategic, go to market playbook?

“I would inform and make sure that they understood that it is a team approach to developing that strategy. The marketing team will be responsible for truly looking at the qualitative study of who that customer is. What are the personas?  And there may be multiple types of customers that you’re dealing with. But in looking at each of those, what are the actual problems that they have that you can solve? What are the challenges, what are the needs, the desires? And then look to the organization as to what do we make and do, and how do we behave in ways that actually matter to that consumer? And then involving the sales team in the development of the strategy so that when they go out, they can speak to the actual things that matter.

“An example, imagine you’re a car manufacturer and you as the engineer who happens to be the CEO decides that all customers out there are excited about the fact that we use thicker steel and quality paint. Things that you think matter. When actually your consumer for the model car that you make is more interested in safety for their family, reliability, and comfort. So there’s a disconnect. Now you’ve got your salespeople out on the word of the CEO, talk about steel and the customers don’t relate. Well, if we knew that there was this niche in the market that wanted those things that we just described, and the marketing team gets that feedback from the sales team, then they’re equipped with the messaging and all the work that marketing does to the world and the audience. Now, the salespeople can speak to that, to the customer who’s the fit. I know it’s a little contrived way of bringing it around, but it’s about the team. It’s not about just making the sales guys go out and do their job.”

Bottom Line:

• Unify across teams.
• Study and understand the customer.
• Develop strategy around customers needs.
• Frame questions around brand alignment to customer interest.
• Translate strategy to the sales team, so that they can communicate essential information to customers.

So, it’s really a synergy that needs to be built between Sales and Marketing departments…

“Look at construction of a house. The designers design a house… And, of course, the guys who come out to dig the hole go, the guys who designed it don’t know what we do. They dig a hole. Then, the next crew comes in and they have to build the foundation. The foundation isn’t right because the guy who dug the hole isn’t right, according to them. And then the next guys who do the framing blame…. So, each is passing it to the next. Well, what would happen if in the design process of a house, you knew who was going to be doing the building and you brought them in and shared the plans with them before you finalize them? Wouldn’t it be great if everyone along the way understood what they’re going to need… and then you start building?

“It’s that way in a powerful business, too. If you listen to teams where marketing and sales are constantly butting heads, the sales guys will tell you, ‘the marketing guys create these programs that can never be implemented because they don’t know anything about our customers.’ And the marketing team is saying, ‘those sales guys, they’re just doing what they want to do. If they would only follow our plan.’ And that’s when the truck hits the telephone pole and everybody gets hurt.”

Bottom Line:

• Each member of the team should know and understand their part of the project.
• Work together as one for the goal of the bottom line.
• Sales and marketing teams on one accord to execute the goal.

Are there any new tools that you’re excited about these days that would be of interest to sales and marketing teams to be aware of?

“One that we’ve brought to market, and again, it isn’t our software, but we provide the training is, is a system. And this is great being an audio podcast because people will have to check it out afterwards called the Virtual Presenter Course*. We found ways to answer the question, how can you be present in the room in a Zoom meeting when you can’t physically be there? How can you be more interesting, impactful, all of those great things in a sales meeting or presentation? So we’ve developed training to use this open source software that’s out there so that when you’re in a Zoom meeting, you can properly do a PowerPoint presentation, walk through a video, demo a website. Rather than being that little head in a box off to the corner, you can be actively in the window while you’re doing that.

“What we found is that salespeople that are using this tech are keeping people interested are much more memorable than that boring guy who isn’t quite focused and doesn’t understand how to give a presentation well and loses his audience. So that’s one tool that we’re advocating for.“

Bottom Line:

• Virtual Presenter Course
• The Virtual Presenter Course trains salespeople to effectively present virtually. 

During AdVic’s podcast chat with Andrew, we also touched on CRM implementation, AI, and turning sales teams into selling machines. Listen to the whole episode here. 

And if you’re looking for CRM solutions for your company to help create a better synergy between your sales and marketing departments, AdVic has a solution, so let’s chat today! Fill out the quick form below, or click here.[gravityform id=5]
*Note: The link offers AdVic Salesforce Blog readers an already-applied $50 off coupon at checkout for the Virtual Presenter Course.

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The post How Sales & Marketing Can Create a Winning Synergy appeared first on Ad Victoriam Solutions.

Why is a CRM Important?

At its core, CRM enables your business to deepen relationships with your customers, service users, colleagues, partners, and suppliers. You can see everything in one place. There’s a simple, customizable dashboard that can show you your customer’s previous history with you. You will also see the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and much more.

Think of CRM as a tool that creates a 360° view of your customers.

CRM also helps you find new customers, win their business, and keep them happy by organizing customer and prospect information in a way that helps you build stronger relationships with them and grow your business faster.

CRM is Not Just for Sales Teams

A CRM platform implementation helps the sales team to better understand their sales pipeline. Sales managers can access reliable information about the progress of individual team members. Sales reps can spend more time selling and less time inputting data. Less time, means they’re more productivity!

But other departments in your company will benefit from a CRM, too.

For instance, marketing teams use CRM to make forecasting simpler and more accurate. Sales gets a clear vision of every opportunity or lead through a mapping of the whole customer journey from inquiry through to sale, with a better understanding of the sales pipeline. Marketing can then use that information to create email, social media, and advertising campaigns targeting your company’s leads.

Another department that benefits from a CRM implementation is Customer Service. Those teams can effectively track conversations across multiple channels. Perhaps a customer might raise an issue in one channel – say, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter – then Customer Service teams can switch to email, phone or live chat to resolve the issue in private.

Remember, without a common platform for customer interactions, communications can be missed or lost in a sea of information. That leads to an unsatisfactory response to a valued customer.

Additionally – and you may never have thought of this – but your HR department can also benefit from a CRM platform. It enables the team to accelerate recruitment, track employee performance, speed the on-boarding process, analyze resourcing needs, identify skills gaps, and support the staff retention targets.

What Else Can a CRM Do?

A CRM platform can also connect to other business apps that help you to further develop customer relationships. A CRM solution can also integrate with your other business tools, such as an ERP, EHR/EMR, document signing, and accounting and billing. Now, information flows freely, giving you a true 360° view of your customer.

Lastly, today’s new generation of CRM platforms goes one step further with built-in intelligence. This automates administrative tasks, like data entry and lead or service case routing, so your teams can free up time for more valuable activities.

These automatically generated insights will help you understand your customers better. They will also predict how customers will feel and act so that you can prepare the right outreach.

Ad Victoriam’s team of consultants can show you how a Salesforce CRM platform implementation can change and grow with your company’s processes. That helps with efficiencies and will have an enormous impact on your company’s bottom line. Let’s talk today! Just click here.

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There are countless pieces of information that make up YOU—the list is long. And, in the data world, those descriptors are points on a graph or information in a spreadsheet.

As a marketer or other business professional, you count on data— insights into personalities—to predict marketing success and help your business grow. Your job is to pull useful data and make predictions about what you should be doing with your products, services, marketing and more. What does that effort look like? This graphic explains it.

When data mining and predictive analytics are done well, your company can understand the past, properly gauge what’s happening now, and successfully predict how consumers will respond to marketing and sales efforts in the future. Don’t wait to get your data working for you, speak to a marketing data expert today. 

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Pardot is a robust marketing automation tool that offers marketers all the customer tracking and communication bells and whistles of their dreams. Before implementing Pardot, read these five important points to keep in mind when first starting to use Pardot.

1. Who will be your Pardot Ninja?

As much as we would love to work with you indefinitely, at some point in time someone internally should own your Pardot instance. That person should be involved with implementing Pardot from the start. I highly recommend this person to be a part of your Marketing Team.  If this isn’t possible, look for someone who is keen on learning new functionality – a self-starter who is creative and has a natural curiosity for technology.

Too many times during a Pardot implementation project, I come across businesses who do not have this person picked out and sometimes do not figure it out until mid-way through the process. This tends to cause some serious lack of productivity during our consulting hours and we want you to get the most bang for your buck!

2. ROI, Analytics, and Reporting

As we all have experienced at some point in our life, nothing is given to us for free – especially when it comes to new business ventures. This is why it’s very important to have a plan on how you are going to report back your return on investment to key stakeholders.

I would ask myself: What is most important to those stakeholders – money brought in via Sales opportunities, or the amount of communication/activity received from the customer?  Is it the amount of net new leads generated via your marketing efforts?

These reporting metrics are possible in Pardot. You just need to plan ahead on how to build and organize your campaigns which will make your reporting reflect the KPIs needed.

This leads me into my next important point during a Pardot Implementation…

3. Pardot Strategy: Implementing Pardot

Too many times a P.O.A. (plan of action) or whiteboard session is forgotten when talking about marketing.  Upon implementing a new Pardot instance, I highly recommend you start with at least two basic scenarios: Net New Leads and Current Customers.  By creating new Pardot forms and generating landing pages you are bound to gain net new leads that are interested in your business.

What is your plan of these net new leads?  Do you plan to nurture them until they reach a certain level of activity that shows interest?  Do you plan to send them immediately over to your sales reps so they may reach out?  How about current customers?  Do you have a plan to keep them engaged in your product and upsell existing products that they would be interested in?

No matter what your P.O.A. is, we can help you build these scenarios out in Pardot as long as you have decided the path that works best for your business process.

4. Content

Now that we have our strategy and plan of action in place, the next step is to build it!  This can be the most exciting part of the process for some.

However, for those who do not have a clear picture in mind of whom will actually build out their content, this step may cause extreme anxiety.  This is why it’s important to know whom will build out those pretty email templates and write up those white-papers ahead of time.  Include them in the overall strategy along with any marketing goals that you wish to report on.  This will help guide them in the process of creating interesting company branded content for your potential or current customers.

5. Organization

Once the building starts taking place, you will begin to see your Pardot instance flooded with email templates, landing pages, forms, lists, etc.  Pardot has an excellent way to keep all of your marketing assets organized via folders and tags.  However, I also highly recommend you come up with a naming structure to help you group the same type of content together for easier access.

As a Pardot registered partner and Salesforce Platinum Partner, Ad Victoriam is fully prepared to team up with your business, leveraging our Salesforce proficiency to put this robust marketing automation tool to work for you. Contact our knowledgeable Pardot consultants to learn more about how we can help.

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