SMARKETING – Sales and Marketing Synergy

Are your Marketing and Sales Departments Aligned?

Marketing and sales: Far too often, these teams work separately, even with the latest technologies for marketing activities and controlling sales processes.

The price you pay for disparate marketing and sales processes is a loss of efficiency and sales opportunities: inconsistent lead qualification, leads lost during handover, lower revenue, and more.

How do I align my marketing and sales processes?

According to MarketingProfs, aligning your marketing and sales can lead to higher customer retention rates (36 %) as well as higher sales win rates (38 %). The first step you can take is not a difficult one, give both departments access to the same information.

The business applications of Microsoft Dynamics 365 will help you with just that. Both Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales are built on the same platform and can thus be combined. It becomes much easier to track the results from both departments as well as to implement changes more effectively without data silos.

Example:

Qualified marketing leads can be transferred to the sales team based on automated rules and processes, and sales can be supported in prioritizing opportunities with lead evaluation models. How? Access to the same data with a shared understanding of entities, relationships, and processes allows the departments to collaborate consistently and without friction. Recurring processes in marketing and sales can also easily be standardized with automated workflows, which results in prospects passing through the marketing and sales funnel more efficiently. Individually configurable dashboards and Power BI insights in the Dynamics 365 apps, help individuals and managers better track campaign performance.

Customer journeys and interactions

Your customers and prospects will quickly grow tired if you don’t coordinate your communication processes properly. With Dynamics 365, you can align your marketing and sales and provide a common understanding of each customer and prospect. Both apps follow a tailored customer approach and help you see how customer journeys differ depending on the person and industry. Insights like these can be used to deliver relevant and tailored content.

Example:

A potential customer visits certain pages on your website, shortly afterwards, they receive offers or information about these pages. Likely, the opening rate will be higher compared to a classic newsletter that provides its subscribers only general information.

With pre-defined processes, design e-mail templates to reach contacts filtered by any attribute or behaviour. This approach provides your marketing and sales departments with detailed demographics and a more complete view of potential customers and their interests.

Close-up: Dynamics 365 Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing covers a broad range of processes from mailings to event management and online marketing. It is ideal for the following purposes:

  • guiding leads along the customer journey

  • creating attractive landing pages

  • planning the flow of customer contacts based on purchasing behaviour and preferences

  • running multi-channel marketing campaigns

  • creating configurable templates, reusable content blocks, and design tools

Close-up: Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales helps categorize and evaluate leads by leveraging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The app is highly customizable and thus suitable for all sorts of companies and industries. It offers you:

  • AI-supported consulting for sellers to build trust with contacts

  • Real-time insights into your pipelines to predict new trends

  • Notifications about deals that are at risk to act fast

  • Out-of-the-box reports for more efficiency

  • Social intelligence to track consumer mood

Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing work well together, but they also allow for adding even more complementary Microsoft business applications – and for certified third-party solutions to extend your Dynamics 365 organization even further.