How Data Drives Sales and Marketing Collaboration

Are your sales and marketing teams working in tandem? According to 87% of sales and marketing leaders, this interdepartmental collaboration supports invaluable business growth. Yet, lack of access to shared, accurate data leads to misalignment across the business 43% of these professionals.

Sales and marketing data is often isolated in digital platforms that require excessive manual effort to connect. In a recent webinar with CData, 451 Research Senior Research Analyst Carl Lehmann highlights how the majority of professionals often lean on error-prone manual document searches (61%), limited pre-built dashboards (29%), and scale-prohibitive ad hoc data prep requests (18%).

Sharing data across departmental lines helps organizations embrace collaboration, gain a more accurate vision of performance, and connect with customers on a deeper, more personalized level. In this article, we’ll explore how connecting and sharing data enables sales and marketing collaboration on a deeper level to give your teams a leg up in today’s competitive market.

Benefits of data analytics in sales and marketing

Combining analytics from sales and marketing data unlocks a world of actionable insights:

Improve buyer personas

Marketing teams often create content based on personas—portraits of fictional characters who represent an organization’s target audience. But sales teams may have an entirely different idea of who they need to sell to. Integrating live sales and marketing data can help to create a more accurate picture of an organization’s target audience.

Align and target content

Marketing campaigns should position content based on the latest sales data—not a snapshot from three months ago. Analyzing live sales data promotes strategized, targeted marketing content that precisely identifies potential customers.

Personalize customer experience

Demographics—from location and industry to skill and education level play a large part in how an audience perceives marketing campaigns. What works in one part of the world may fall flat in another. Recognizing the different needs between demographics can help personalize the customer experience.

Address pain points

When marketing efforts don’t align with sales data, problems can get overlooked. Marketing campaigns can come across as outdated or “tone-deaf” and turn off potential customers. Access to live sales data analytics allows marketing teams to turn pain points into sales opportunities.

Maximize ROI

Is your marketing strategy paying off? Is your sales team talking to the right people? Analyze sales data in tandem with marketing data to reveal gaps in marketing campaigns and fine-tune sales efforts to maximize revenue.

Sales data enables more meaningful marketing

To create campaigns that attract quality leads, marketing teams rely on input from sales on the trends and challenges they see when talking to customers. They also require a full understanding of what content is most effective to get leads in the door, and which channels are most effective to get that content in front of quality leads.

However, customer information may live across several unintegrated systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, lead tracking and scoring systems, sales analytics platforms, and marketing automation and account-based marketing (ABM) tools. Without a strategy to connect these systems and democratize customer information, marketing teams are often working in the dark to promote your business.

Marketing becomes empowered when they can align and target their content, campaigns, and promotions with actual customer pain points, decisions, and feedback gathered at sales touchpoints. Sales touchpoints can fill significant blind spots in marketing’s view of the customer journey.

For instance, customer pipeline trends might reveal opportunities to attract better-qualified personas and reduce friction in the sales funnel. Once they can extract how closed deals are linked to specific campaigns or marketing channels, marketing teams can refine how they target their efforts.

In this scenario, the marketing team needs a lightweight, self-service solution to quickly analyze successful sales trends against marketing funnel engagement by accessing customer and campaign information across multiple data sources.

How marketing processes can connect to sales data

Marketing can leverage a real-time data connectivity platform to access and analyze cross-departmental data in real-time and directly in their preferred analytics tool — without needing to build out a custom integration pipeline. They no longer need to wait for the IT or sales teams to synchronize data from Salesforce with marketing touchpoints like Pardot and social media. Instead, they get real-time access to consolidated reports within the tools they already use.

This dramatically reduces the roadblocks to accessing customer data and gives marketing a better understanding of the entire customer journey. In turn, the knowledge will allow them to make better, more informed decisions, create more effective content, and pass along the best quality leads possible to their sales team.

Marketing data enables more personalized sales processes

Digital transformation has fundamentally changed the buying journey. As cold calling has gone out of favor, sales teams today are far more dependent on marketing leads. Potential buyers today become aware of and refine their interest in businesses through marketing channels like social media and search engines long before they talk to a sales representative.

To close more deals, sales teams can gather vital information about their customer base from marketing touchpoints. Data around campaign engagement, demographics, and lead scoring give sales reps a leg up when engaging with prospective customers. They can tailor their conversations with leads to discuss specific pain points and opportunities based on previously collected marketing data.

Sales can also share this data across their team to intelligently time their outreach based on campaigns that are running, assign follow-ups, and refine how they’re messaging proposals. When a sales team can quickly align their selling points with a lead’s pre-identified interests, they give those leads an easier path to buy.

How sales processes can connect marketing data

Getting to marketing data is easier said than done for most sales organizations. Hunting across multiple marketing applications, tools, and automation platforms to align efforts is a cumbersome process that many sales reps have no time for.

Connecting sale and marketing data, whether that is on an application-to-application basis or in a consolidated database or warehouse, is an efficient way for these departments to share data across platforms. Not only does this open up opportunities for sales to tailor their processes to the right audiences, but it also gives sales teams data-driven facts to inform marketing on how to supply better-quality leads. It’s a win-win.

Enable sales and marketing collaboration with CData

From communications and accountability between departments to customer information sharing, interdepartmental collaboration takes many forms. Data connectivity is the key to unlocking the wealth of data-driven opportunities across your business.

CData offers an expansive roster of automated, self-service data connectivity solutions to allow sales and marketing to succeed together. Find out what CData can do for you with a free 30-day trial.