Red Alert:Your investment in sales and marketing automation may be going down the drain

You know that a sales and marketing automation platform can help you boost your sales revenue and marketing ROI, but if you move on to a new sales enablement platform, where does your CRM fit?

If you want your investment in the sales and marketing automation tool to really make your life easier, then make sure your sales enablement software does the following:

Contact sync:

Make sure your sales enablement platform synchronizes contacts with your CRM so your sales team doesn’t have to worry about importing contact lists from one platform to another. More brownie points if the contact synchronization is bi-directional—that is, it happens both ways. Wherever a contact is added, it shows up in both systems, making life easy for everyone involved.

Flexibility:

A key factor to consider when assessing contact management capabilities of your new marketing and sales enablement software is the flexibility with respect to lead sync.That includes the frequency of the sync, the ability to sync at any time manually without depending on the system to do so and also any limitations to the sync function with respect to the fields/contact info that can be imported.

Lead nurturing:

Be sure that your marketing and sales enablement platform is capable of nurturing your CRM leads. This is important because lead nurturing can boost your closure rates dramatically. In fact, a study by DemandGen states that nurtured leads have a 20% greater chance of being converted as compared to non-nurtured ones.

Multi-dimensional approach to lead tracking:

One of the biggest challenges salespeople face is lead quality. Most often salespeople cite lack of purchase readiness as the reason for not closing. Your sales and marketing automation platform should be capable of automatically nurturing the lead and then pushing that lead into your CRM application when it is ready for contact with sales—and this feature should work irrespective of the lead source.

Unobstructed prospect view:

Ensure that your sales team gets in-depth prospect insight without even switching from your CRM to the sales and marketing automation platform. That involves investing in a platform that synchronizes not just basic contact information, but also contact scores and behavior—all in real-time.

If you want your sales enablement platform to be a hit with your sales team, make sure it does more than what is expected of it and makes their lives really easy.