Discover How Marketing and Sales Integration Boosts Revenue

As per HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report cost of customer acquisition for U.S. companies with 200+ employees falls by as much as $197 when there is formal marketing and sales agreement.

Surprising right? Read on to know how you can integrate the automation platforms by leveraging the leaders – Marketo and Salesforce.
Importance of Sales and Marketing Integration

Revenue is affected when marketing and sales are silos. Marketing automation platform enables easy tracking and recording of marketing initiatives. On the other hand, sales platform maintains the data that connects closed business to marketing initiatives. By integrating your sales and marketing platforms, you can make this cycle work to maximize the revenue growth. Marketo, a marketing automation platform has grown to 3000+ customers in 6 years of establishment and Salesforce, a cloud CRM is helping 100,000+ customers build better customer relationships. Individually these giants are great platforms for their customers but together they deliver amazing lead-to-revenue conversion. With seamless integration and easy customization, marketing and sales automation is facilitating organizations worldwide break down those silos.

Companies who have integrated Marketo and Salesforce have recorded:

• Low cost per qualified lead
• Low cost per opportunity
• Improved response rates per campaign type
• High conversion rates from each stage of your revenue cycle to the next stage
• More Marketing Qualified and Sales Accepted leads
• Better tracking the opportunities and revenue per campaign type
• Increased sales productivity

Improve Sales Insights with Marketo

Marketo and Salesforce are particularly great together through Marketo Salesforce Connector and products like Marketo Sales Insights. Marketo easily integrates with CRM systems like Salesforce, MS Dynamics and allows you to define and map out stages of sales funnel. It tracks each lead’s progress through the funnel to improve lead quality and lead-to-opportunity conversion. Your sales reps get better access to hot leads, and not just MQLs based on lead scoring campaigns. By tracking in-depth insights, Marketo enables sales reps receive real-time updates on lead status and be better prepared at each stage.

Optimize Marketing Campaigns with Salesforce

Salesforce.com offers a robust platform and cloud CRM solution to assist companies with sales operations and track progress at each stage of the sales funnel. Since Marketo offers native support for Salesforce CRM integration, your marketing team can optimize campaigns and take smarter decisions. Salesforce provides marketers better visibility on impact of marketing campaigns on your company’s bottom line results.
With Salesforce, your sales reps keep a track of their contacts, accounts and opportunities for their prospects and customers and your marketing team can track progress of leads, and run smart campaigns. You can easily leverage Marketo templates in Salesforce and ensure parallel and comprehensive tracking in both the platforms.
Additionally, Salesforce also offers dashboards, chatter, Twitter integration and so much more that can be easily customized and integrated with your Marketo instance.

What to Consider when implementing Marketo and Salesforce

Marketo and Salesforce when combined drive revenue growth for organizations.

However, continuing the analogy, you need to make marketers and salespeople talk in the same language to get revenue growth. Some areas where it can be achieved are:

1. Lead Process

   Providing marketing qualified leads and sales accepted leads is not enough for sales team. Your sales team needs to know how the lead was acquired and how it progressed through different stages in the lead funnel. Sales reps need to know the demographic and behavioural traits used by marketing team to create the lead scoring model.In return, the insights from sales team about the buyer characteristics can improve the scoring model.
   During the lead lifecycle process, it is imperative that the teams are in constant communication. This process typically starts in Marketo and goes through each sales stage in Salesforce and then is recycled back to Marketo. This process includes change over from Marketo to Salesforce and then back to Marketo. It is important that both the teams understand how and when the changeover is going to happen.
   Lead Assignment Rules in Salesforce can be used to automate lead assignment process, but the Sales and Marketing folks have to decide the criteria. While the Sales VP will have ideas on which team/individual is the best person for incoming Leads, the Marketing VP will understand the prospect segments. This combination can help shed light on the criteria that forms the base for creating balanced Lead Assignment groupings.

2. Contact Roles

   Contact Roles are the link between Marketo Programs and opportunity in Salesforce. Contact roles as a feature helps the marketing and sales team understand the leads’ role from amongst these:

   • Initiator
   • Influencer
   • Decision-maker
   • Buyer
   • User
   • Gatekeeper

   In Salesforce, you can assign a contact role to any contact or person account that affects your account, case, contract, or opportunity. However, when you integrate Marketo and Salesforce it becomes easier to have a holistic idea on the lead’s influence on the buying process. In the integrated instance, it is easier to view unified reports in a visual manner for the different stages i.e. when a Lead is created in Marketo, the nurture track, and then the association with an Opportunity in Salesforce.com.

3. Correct Amount in Closed Won Dollars

   For a sales rep, working on Salesforce entering the data is not the end. He needs to enter this regularly and accurately. In addition, when you integrate sales and marketing it is important that you build a mechanism to enforce this. This mechanism helps marketers accurately understand how their marketing initiatives are influencing the activities of the sales rep, which in turn helps better analyse the bottom line results.
   To garner support of your sales rep for building this mechanism your team needs to be clear with the reasons behind this mechanism. Some pointers are productivity gain for the sales rep, the increase in value of individual pipeline management, and easy lead follow up.Now that you know why sales and marketing integration is important and how to leverage technology to do the same, it is time for you to apply this knowledge. When you start applying this let us know, we would love to know how we are helping you create better organizations.

References:

• http://writtent.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/inbound-6.png
• http://www.opfocus.com/blog/achieving-marketing-sales-alignment-using-marketo-and-salesforce-com/

About Grazitti^™ Marketing Automation Services