Connecting Your Sales Enablement Software with Other Systems: The Bigger Picture: Part - 1

In today’s competitive market, companies are looking for ways to increase and improve the quality of leads they obtain. In the past, the importance of aligning your sales and marketing teams was not as pronounced as it is now.

Due to high competition and higher customer awareness, it has become difficult to generate leads from a single source. A CRM system is a great way to tap into lead data from the very beginning of the sales cycle.

However, just the lead data isn't enough to move them down the sales funnel. You need to gain real time insight into prospect behavior so you can differentiate between the ready-to-buy prospects and the still-researching prospects. Connecting systems can result in higher productivity.

Wikipedia’s definition of system integration is “the process of linking together different computing systems and software applications physically or functionally, to act as a coordinated whole” clearly states that the key to a successful integration is “awesome synchronization”.

Connecting with other systems is, however, not as simple as it may seem. It involves a thorough study of what kind of sales enablement software you will need to improve the efficiency of your CRM. How do these systems complement each other, will this slow down your current process? Will this result in shorter workflows and more importantly; will all these efforts yield higher sales for your organization?

For ages, sales teams have relied solely on CRM systems for maintaining their prospect data. When a new prospect is identified by marketing and passed on to sales, a sales rep diligently feeds that data into the system. Most of this data lies there, gathering dust, because only 1 out of every 10 SQLs ever converts to customers.

CRM Integration

Losing 9 out of 10 leads is definitely not a pleasing statistic. If you want to see a change in this statistic, you need to consider integrating your CRM with a sales enablement software that is able to fix the leaking spots of your sales funnel.

One of the reasons why companies lose out on leads is because sales teams are hardly involved in the purchase cycle of the customer. It is only towards the very end that a sales rep comes into the picture. Marketing hands over the leads to sales with relevant information and collateral and expects them to close the deal. The sales rep, having no prior knowledge of the prospect, dives headlong into a seemingly unfamiliar territory and fails to live up to what Marketing promised to the leads. This results in poor close rates as sales and marketing aren’t on the same page.

Marketing and sales often run parallel campaigns. While one is busy promoting Quality A to the prospect, the other may promote Quality B. This ends up confusing the prospect, further contributing to poor close rates.Integrating your CRM and sales enablement closes this gap and promotes transparency between sales and marketing. Unlike a CRM, the core function of Sales Enablement Software is to measure and automate the complete sales processes.

How this integration helps you:

1. Contact sharing: Integrating your CRM with Sales enablement software can automatically update your lead information. You can import all your contacts from your existing CRM to the Sales Enablement system and vice versa.
2. Lead analytics: When you engage a lead in one of your campaigns, sales enablement software tracks how and when leads interacts with it. Based on this interaction, the lead is automatically scored in your CRM.
3. Marketing-sales alignment: You get a one-stop place where your marketing team can communicate with sales personnel. Your marketing and sales team can work in tandem to improvise on strategic planning through marketing tools like email, web, playbook, eBook, print materials, and social publishing.

Integrating your sales enablement software with a CRM system will let you delegate the right job to the right system- which means you get the best of both worlds integrated to work as one whole unit, resulting in higher productivity with hardly any increased costs.