Sync your Sales and Marketing with Clean Customer Data

Sales teams and marketing teams are often in competition which is bad for your business.  Getting your sales team and your marketing team to collaborate effectively may seem like a challenge so we show you how to do this by harnessing the power of your customer data.

If you want to make sure your sales team and marketing team are signing from the same song sheet, you need to ensure that you’re working with an efficient system.  If your teams are working in different platforms it could be causing problems for your business.  For instance, your sales team may use one platform to funnel leads through the sales pipeline while your marketing team is using another to send out targeted email campaigns and nurture their prospects.  This could mean that marketing doesn’t get enough feedback from sales and potential leads slip through the net.

You need to be managing contacts across your business cloud apps so that you don’t end up with inaccurate data or duplicate entries that will just confuse the issue and complicate communication between the teams when it needs to be improved.  A key element to improve this is to manage your contacts effectively.

Storing your customer data across unconnected software (data silos) is a major cause of communication problems that makes reporting difficult and key decisions difficult to make because the data is not readily available.  You’ll need to eliminate data silos to get the most out of your customer data and improve the communication process within your organisation.  The best way to do this is to integrate your data and create a continuous data flow.

There are several apps available which will integrate your data in this way or you could use a third-party syncing service which will sync your customer and lead information across SaaS apps so that your marketing team can continue to use its current system and your sales team can use a CRM of their choice.  Syncing data between marketing and sales will eliminate data silos while enhancing communication so that both teams are in sync about each individual customer and have access to the right information at the right time.

Cleaning your Customer Data

Once your customer data has been integrated, you need to make sure it’s clean in order to enhance customer and prospect experiences via targeting and personalisation campaigns.  Clean data is essential for marketing campaigns and for sales teams to function effectively.  Here’s what you need to do:

  • Company-wide data input standards should be implemented to prevent duplication and confusion. This will ensure that your customer service team is fully aware of each interaction with each customer and prevent any mistakes or confusion in future.
  • Make sure there are no duplicates already in your CRM by using the merging tool (most CRMs feature a tool for merging duplicates).
  • Use parsing tools (such as Evercontact) to keep your data current. Some tools will continuously capture new contact information from email signatures in order to create new contacts and update existing contacts in CRMs, Google Contacts and Outlook.  Salesforce is a Chrome plug-in that will also enable you to capture contact information from the websites you view and present it in a format in which you can either reject or validate the suggested changes (which means you stay in constant control of this data).

Clean customer data will enable you to stay ahead of the game with streamlined data systems that will allow you to make the most of the data you collect.

Richard Coen

With over 21 years of experience in Digital Marketing, 31 years in sales and 25 years in business development, Richard assists companies to develop key growth strategies on a local or international basis. He can assist marketers to achieve balance in their approach to key areas affected by the growth in digital marketing.