How to Use a CRM Tool to Integrate Sales and Marketing for Better Results

May 31, 2022

Sales and marketing integration is essential to cannabis business success, and a critical step to remove barriers between sales and marketing teams is to use a robust and reliable customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

The right CRM software delivers so many benefits to cannabis and ancillary businesses. For example, the right CRM tool gives every team member the ability to consistently and effectively communicate with prospective, current, and former customers at each stage of the consumer journey. Ultimately, everyone on your sales and marketing teams will be working lockstep toward the same goals. Customer happiness will increase, and your business will grow.

Integrate Sales and Marketing Goals and KPIs in Your CRM

A reliable and robust CRM tool not only brings all of your prospect and customer data together, but it can also bring your sales and marketing teams together through shared goals and performance metrics. In other words, barriers come down when teams have to work collaboratively to manage customer relationships in a single software tool.

For instance, rather than creating sales quota goals for the sales team and separate lead generation goals for the marketing team, you can create shared revenue-generation goals. As a result, sales and marketing employees will be motivated to work together to meet those goals rather than work counterproductively in separate silos.

Keep in mind, integrating your data and goals in your CRM software won’t instantly integrate your sales and marketing teams. First, you need to have a CRM strategy and invest in training to ensure every team member understands how to leverage the features of the CRM to reach their shared goals together. If team members don’t understand and buy into the integration and CRM strategy, your business won’t achieve optimal results.

Integrate Sales and Marketing Communications in Your CRM

When your sales and marketing team members can quickly look up a prospect or customer in your CRM tool and see that customer’s complete history, including a history of their communications with your company, they’ll save time and be more effective in their jobs. Not only does this help your business get a higher return on your CRM investment today, but it also increases customer happiness, which leads to more sales and revenue in the future.

Think of it this way – when sales and marketing teams (and customer service teams) can’t cooperate and collaborate using a CRM tool, problems can arise for prospects and customers. For example, they may receive the wrong communications, promises from your business could be broken, and they may have to repeat themselves again and again when they contact your business (and we all know how frustrating that can be for customers). All of these problems create customer pain points that could lead to lost sales.

However, when your teams can track customer histories instantly and collaborate seamlessly, they’ll be able to solve customer problems quickly. Even better, they can avoid creating customer problems entirely. As long as your employees are fully educated about where and how to find communication histories in your CRM tool as well as how to consistently document their own communications with contacts in your CRM tool, your employees, prospects, and customers will be happier.

Integrate Sales and Marketing Workflows

A significant benefit of using a CRM tool is being able to integrate sales and marketing workflows. When business processes are well-defined and aligned, there is no question about who owns what, who is responsible for what, and how processes work. All of the features you need to improve processes and keep workflows moving without delays are included in a robust CRM software.

For example, your CRM tool should allow your sales and marketing team members to assign tasks, add comments and notes, and set up notifications. Each of these features is essential to track progress against goals and hold the right people accountable for hitting shared revenue goals.

In addition, your CRM software should allow you to create processes for identifying, qualifying, and handing off leads. Tags and automations are powerful features that you can use to streamline sales and marketing workflows within your CRM tool. Therefore, write up workflows for your CRM, and make sure all employees are trained on how to follow the written processes and use the relevant features in your CRM tool.

RELATED READING: Importance of CRM in the Cannabis Industry

Key Takeaways about How to Use a CRM Tool to Integrate Sales and Marketing

You can integrate your sales and marketing teams using a CRM tool but only if you have a solid CRM strategy, train your employees, and use a CRM software that offers the features you need to do it all successfully.

For a CRM software that helps you integrate your sales and marketing teams so they can connect with verified cannabis and hemp license holder leads in the U.S., Canada, and international markets, schedule a demo of the Cannabiz Media License Database.

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