5 Sales Acceleration Technologies That Drive Sales and Marketing Alignment

Oil and water. The Hatfields and McCoys. Sales and marketing.  Too often these two revenue-generating groups are in conflict with each other.

You know how the battle goes.

Sales complains that marketing is not producing enough quality leads. Marketing fires back that sales isn’t working the supplied leads hard enough.

The gloves come off and between all the bickering, business slips through the cracks.

Sales acceleration technologies that integrate seamlessly with your CRM can stop the finger-pointing and align your sales and marketing teams.

These five tools will help you bridge the gap between these departments, and will generate revenue for your company:

1. Predictive analytics

Infusing predictive analytics into your CRM seamlessly injects the power of big data into your marketing and sales workflow. As predictive analytics technology applies insights from billions of sales interactions to the leads generated by marketing, it is able to prescriptively sort those leads according to which are most likely to convert into opportunities and close. Armed with analytics, reps know which leads to work and when to contact them.

2. Dialing technology

Industry research indicates that only 27 percent of leads supplied to sales by marketing are ever contacted.  We also know that immediacy matters when it comes to contacting leads, as 78 percent of buyers choose the vendor that responds to their needs first.  Good leads can languish in the Bermuda Triangle that often exists between sales and marketing, taking so long to get contacted that they just disappear.

Dialing technology solves these sales problems.  A prescriptive dialer can pull the most relevant leads to the top of a rep’s list, enabling that rep to communicate with the right prospects, at the right time, with the right message.  Dialers integrate easily with other technologies like Salesforce.

Dialer technology further maximizes reps’ time by automatically logging data to the CRM, offering single-click dialing, automating voicemail and using local callerID display to increase connect rates.

3. Email tracking

Email is traditionally considered to be a marketing tool, but email tracking technology enables sales and marketing to share the power of the most preferred method of professional communication.

Email tracking technology can provide real-time alerts to sales reps, delivering increased awareness of the buying signals exhibited by marketing leads.

4. Data-driven hiring

Of course, all the sales acceleration technology in the world is ineffective if placed in the wrong hands. To maintain mutual goodwill and enthusiasm between your sales and marketing departments, you have to get the right bodies in the right seats.

Data science applied to sales hiring measures the character dispositions of your applicants, scoring them on key traits in order to remove the guesswork from hiring.

Further, this type of technology allows you to audit the key attributes of all your employees to identify trends and themes that are specific to your business model and company culture. You can know how likely your reps are to succeed with the leads marketing hands them before they even step on the floor.

5. Gamification

With sales acceleration technology and the right people in the right seats, the last key for better aligning your sales and marketing teams is to keep both departments motivated in supporting the other, making each less inclined to play the blame game.

Gamification technologies used to motivate sales reps have been shown to boost sales performance by as much as 40 percent or more.

Paired with predictive analytics technology, gamification can leverage your company’s data and an individual rep’s performance history to pinpoint what motivates each rep.

Whenever leads are handed from marketing to sales, conditions are ripe for problems. Technology offers tools that can solve common lead generation snags, and align sales and marketing around company goals.

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