Aligning sales and marketing to work seamlessly together is still the holy grail for many B2B businesses. And it comes with its own sets of challenges.
Research shows that 43% of people working in sales and marketing lack accurate, shared data on accounts and prospects, while 37% see sales and marketing processes as broken or flawed. These are quite considerable percentages.
Businesses often don’t segment their audiences (or don’t do it accurately enough), which means marketers can’t create and provide content that’s tailored to their prospects’ needs. On the other hand, salespeople don’t get the right, qualified leads they can close. And a vicious cycle is created.
Many organizations don’t have the data or tactics in place to answer questions like:
- When do we assume the lead is ready to be passed to the sales team?
- What does a Sales Qualified Lead mean within our organization?
- What happens when the lead doesn’t buy from us after X attempts or a month of personal contact with a salesperson? Many organizations disqualify prospects like these and never communicate with them again.
Top it off with the manual handling of data in excel spreadsheets that takes time and effort and is prone to errors.
Add it all up and this directly affects the company’s bottom line.
In this article, we’re looking at practical solutions on how technology can help bring sales and marketing processes together – and automate them using the leading integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and GetResponse MAX email and marketing automation platform. So that both teams share a harmonious and collaborative workspace.
Use the lead scoring to identify Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
With GetResponse MAX, you can automate complex scenarios to nurture your audience with relevant, personalized communications.
All your prospects’ actions and interactions with your brand can become a source of meaningful insights, but only if you can track and interpret the data at scale. That’s where marketing automation and lead scoring come in, allowing you to automate the interpretation of your customers’ actions (or lack of actions) at scale and automatically.
The lead score is a measure of how likely an individual prospect is to convert to a customer. It’s based on their characteristics indicated by the information they provide when they sign up using a form, and their behavior such as interactions with your website and emails.
Lead scoring opens the door to better collaboration between your sales and marketing teams, allowing them to work in lockstep toward common goals with all the information, insights, and data they could need.
Here’s how the lead scoring in GetResponse MAX account helps you align sales and marketing teams:
- To start, determine what value (number of points) to assign to certain actions and behaviors, like visiting a specific page, downloading certain content, or watching a video.
- Then, along with the sales team, establish a threshold for qualifying a lead. Once the score is equal to or greater than a specific value, it’s time to pass that lead onto the sales team.
- This way, sales can focus on qualified leads only, while the marketing team continues nurturing the unqualified ones with content that slowly gets them ready to buy.
Marketing automation makes the whole process quick, simple, and straightforward because the score is assigned automatically within the marketing automation workflows you create in GetResponse MAX, all based on customer actions and behaviors.
Here’s what a workflow assigning scoring points might look like:
Use the engagement score to identify the most active and inactive prospects
The engagement score is a GetResponse tool that identifies and scores your contacts’ activity based on their interactions with your emails.
We process the data in real-time to provide you with a prediction of your contacts’ interest in your emails. Based on that, we put contacts on a certain engagement level, choosing from a 5-step scale:
- Not engaged
- At risk
- Neutral
- Engaged
- Highly engaged
Here’s how you can use that in your marketing campaigns:
- Segment your contacts based on their engagement levels automatically using dynamic segmentation. You only need to create engagement-based segments once.
- Use your segments to send better-targeted emails based on the engagement score. For those whose engagement is high, create content that maintains their high engagement and moves them down the marketing funnel.
- For those unengaged, you can try winning back their interest with a reactivation campaign and different messaging strategies.
Pass Sales Qualified Leads to your sales team automatically
When you have your lead scoring and engagement workflows in place, you can automate the process of passing SQLs to your sales team with the GetResponse MAX Dynamics CRM integration.
Follow the simple steps:
- Set up an automation workflow to move qualified contacts to a specific list in the GetResponse MAX account.
- This list is then automatically synced with the Dynamics CRM, making all your contacts’ data and information about their behavior available to your sales team in real-time.
Here’s what that looks like in the Microsoft Dynamics panel:
Want to see the Microsoft Dynamics and GetResponse MAX integration in action? Watch a short demo video to find out more below:
Create dynamic marketing lists in Dynamics CRM
In B2B organizations, every lead is valuable, especially if you’re selling high-value products and services with high CPAs. A single sale can make a massive impact on the ROI.
To avoid losing promising leads, use the Dynamics CRM to automate your lead evaluation process.
With the integration, you can find specified groups and segment them in a snap, based on all the available information in real-time, transferred to the Dynamics CRM from your GetResponse MAX account.
How does that work?
Your contacts are added dynamically to the segments and updated in real-time in your CRM. So if you create a segment on Monday, and launch a sales campaign on Wednesday, people in that time frame will be added automatically, and the list will be updated.
Create automated workflows for remarketing campaigns
A typical scenario in B2B companies might look like this:
- Marketing develops and runs lead nurturing campaigns.
- Then passes qualified contact info to sales for personal, 1-on-1 contact.
- The process either results in a purchase or no opportunity created.
What happens when a contact is abandoned?
The marketing budget spent on acquisition, like expensive LinkedIn ads, exhibitions, and other marketing costs, will have worked for brand awareness but did not bring in any revenue for the effort, money, and time spent.
To avoid that, we recommend establishing an automated process, sending all the contacts who didn’t buy back to the marketing team for further nurturing. This will optimize your ROI and reduce customer acquisition costs.
Here’s how you can do it in Dynamics CRM:
- Create a dynamic list with all the contacts fulfilling specified requirements, like the time taken for personal contact with the sales team that didn’t result in a sale.
- Using the integration with GetResponse MAX, pass them back automatically to the marketing nurturing flow.
- Let the marketing team create a nurturing email series in GetResponse MAX to send valuable content to the leads who didn’t convert.
Marketing automation will take care of the rest of the remarketing campaign.
You can set those processes up once, and they’ll work for you for as long as you need them to. And you’ll have time to concentrate on the creative part of sales and marketing and optimizing your campaigns.
Summing up
Marketing automation and leading integration of the marketing and sales stack can be powerful in aligning sales and marketing processes, making sure no promising leads fall through the cracks.
The whole point is not to reinvent the wheel, using up time and resources, but to follow established processes proven to help grow and scale businesses. And they’re available through the Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration you can try out with your GetResponse MAX account.
Click the button below to find out more: