If your answer is no, you aren’t alone.  Marketing, sales and customer service representatives often have their own agendas and methods for attracting and retaining customers.  Although teams are separated into different departments for functional reasons, they share common goals – to identify, attract and retain customers.  All too often these three teams become focused on their own mission, and don’t communicate and collaborate with the other departments.  In addition, many businesses implement function-specific software that builds information silos instead of encouraging greater communication and collaboration. As a result, you have three important elements of your organization working independently when the business could benefit greatly if they could work together.

A robust customer relationship management (CRM) solution, such as Sage® CRM, provides, in a single software solution, the tools that the marketing, sales, and customer service teams can all use.

Marketing teams are responsible for generating leads for the sale team to pursue. Marketers can plan, execute, and monitor the results of campaigns directly from Sage CRM.  Automations, including templates and workflows, provide a consistent way for marketers to send out the right information to the right prospects and customers, at the right time.  Marketing team members can identify trends and analyze data to fine-tune marketing campaigns and measure ROI and, most importantly, generate leads for the sales team.

Sales team members strive to turn leads into prospects and prospects into customers. Sales reps can follow leads, monitor sales activities, and have customer account details at their fingertips with Sage CRM.  Sales team members can use interactive dashboards to highlight opportunities, pipelines, and sales cycles, as well as shared calendars and appointments.  With key data within reach, sales representatives can access prospective customer information from mobile devices while out of the office and colleagues can respond to prospects when an assigned representative is unavailable.  Prompt responses from the sales team can lead to higher conversion of leads to customers.

Customer service teams work to retain customers.  Customer service staff can use the centralized data in Sage CRM to deliver prompt responses to questions or concerns from customers.  By accessing the same system as the marketing and sales teams, they have access to a continuum of customer information – from the initial identification of the company as a marketing lead, to a sales prospect to a valued customer. In addition, Sage CRM offers built-in business intelligence that each of your teams can use to identify trends with customer behaviors, product popularity, and seasonal or other influences that can impact business forecasts.  These insights can support customer service goals as well as improve customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

Get your marketing, sales and customer service teams on the same page by implementing a CRM solution for your business.