Your sales and marketing teams should work together like a well-oiled machine, passing leads from marketing to sales for them to close the deal with, but that doesn’t always happen, does it? Sometimes things get missed, or left behind, or misdirected.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could wave a magic wand and make things work the way you wanted? Well, you may have heard Arthur C. Clarke’s law that goes “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Here’s some tech that might give you some magical results.
Customer Relationship Management Database (CRM)
Usually CRM is talked about in terms of customer support software, tracking help tickets and other customer service calls. This is a gold mine of data about your customers which can lead to finding out what thrills them and what chills them and using that to close deals faster. Plus it can be used to sell again to current customers based on their needs as recorded in the CRM.
There are more uses, but those assume marketing lead data is stored in this convenient location designed to hold exactly the kind of information on leads that sales wants and needs. That’s what you are doing, isn’t it? Storing lead information in this perfectly designed system for it? Presto!
Analytics
Tools to analyze both marketing effectiveness and current marketing trends hold a lot of value for the sales team as well. Peter Drucker said “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” If you aren’t bothering to measure your marketing, then you aren’t bothering to manage it. If your sales team and marketing team are not aligned in what direction they are going, based on solid analytic information, then you are generating leads they aren’t interested in following up. That’s just wasting money and effort to find the wrong customers. No one can afford to do that for long. Not when it makes their money disappear.
Conversion Optimization
This is all about converting visitors into customers, but doing it better every time. Usually only a small percentage of visitors do what you want them to do when they visit your website. What you want is for them to fill out a form so you can understand what worked and what didn’t.
Conversion Optimization software helps you increase that percentage by letting you test different landing pages one versus the other (A/B testing) and finding the one that creates more conversions. Using some of the tools available you can double your conversion rate. Some have boasted of having ten times the typical conversion rate. And more conversions means more prospects in the sales pipeline. Just like magic.
Take things a step forward and implement your SEO strategy onto your landing pages to boost your authority even more. The best seo tools to grow your site will help you with your on page copy too. You can set target keywords, meta descriptions, and even get a score for your content’s complexity. The more green lights you have on your pages, the better they are going to convert.
Remarketing
This highly technical marketing tool (it involves cookies!) does one simple thing. Understand your visitors. After visiting your site, the visitor has an electronic cookie which will allow certain advertising on other sites to identify them and advertise your company to them on that new site.
This is common with digital marketing agencies (it’s technical, very much in their area of expertise) but it is more rare in other industries. Cast your spell over visitors, give them a cookie, and let other sites remind them you have something they want. Abracadabra, another possible prospect for sales.
Mobile
Optimizing your website to look good on mobile devices might not seem like either a marketing or a sales tool, but think of it this way. A prospective customer who is so interested in your company they have to get on their smartphone and check out your site right now is a solid sales lead. Investing marketing funds to make sure the mobile version of your site is just as attractive, usable, and marketable as the main site is money well spent.
How else will you find and convert people who are so excited about your company they can’t even wait to sit down at a computer, but need to know instantly what you can do for them? Also consider geography, this prospect might be in just the perfect place as well as at the perfect time. Don’t let that magical combination pass you by.
You know the marketing and sales pipelines well. These are the well-established routes to turn people out in the wide world into customers. Equip your marketing and sales teams with the best of the new technological tools to take advantage of the new ways these pipelines can be filled.
Work to closely integrate those teams, making sure that marketing knows what sales wants and is working to deliver it, and that sales knows what marketing is delivering and takes advantage of it. The combination of alignment and technology to assist them in each doing the best job they can is nothing short of magical.
