If the goal of any organization is revenue, sales and marketing are likely to be the two most significant steps to get there. Each has a distinct role to play in driving awareness, building credibility, encouraging consideration, and closing the sale. But too often, marketing and sales are considered separate entities that only collaborate in a ‘hand-off’ when the general marketing message switches to more personalized and narrow sales pitches. In reality, a tight sales and marketing integration will lead to tangible benefits, increasing efficiencies and building a better sales funnel.
Creating that level of integration is complex. Fortunately, modern tools like artificial intelligence have made it a more natural step. As a result, both departments work together more smoothly for the greater good of the organization.
What is Marketing and Sales Integration?
The core concept is simple. Integrating marketing and sales means getting both teams together to align processes, share data better, and collaborate. It’s shifting from management-by-organizational-chart to management-by-objectives. When the singular objective is gaining customers and revenue, both departments can work together more closely to make it happen.
Think about it from your customers’ perspective. For them, marketing and sales should be indistinguishable. The messaging, and the overall look and feel of the brand, should be the same whether they see an ad, visit the website, or talk to a sales rep. There is, after all, a single customer journey. Marketing and sales integration is designed to ensure that this goal becomes a reality.
There are two paths to accomplishing that goal:
- Unifying your marketing and sales teams. In this case, a single group is responsible for the entire sales funnel. This is the best way to accomplish full integration. However, it can also come with some drawbacks as marketing and sales still require unique skill sets and competencies on each side.
- Streamlining your marketing and sales processes. This approach means keeping the teams separate by looking for unification of goals, tools, and processes. Dedicated core competencies in each area remain. However, all work together toward the common goal.
The second approach is more common and, in many organizations, easier to implement. Either way, though, organizations strategically integrating their marketing and sales efforts can reap many rewards.
The Benefits of Integrating Marketing and Sales
Naturally, the biggest benefit of sales and marketing integration is in the customer experience. A smooth experience reduces cognitive dissonance, allowing the entire process from first awareness to final decision to feel unified and consistent.
In addition, integrating your processes on both ends and streamlining your efforts accordingly can also become a significant resource saver. For example, better data sharing from the sales end allows marketing to target its ads better, reaching more relevant audiences at a more reasonable cost. On the other side, if sales understands the marketing messaging better, pitches can become more personalized and relevant.
Sales and marketing teams working closely together can also enhance collaboration, bringing new perspectives into the equation. The chances of groupthink become lower, as experts in different functional areas exchange ideas and bring their unique backgrounds to the table.
Consider the example of a lead in a B2B field with a long customer journey. Initially, they’ll be the responsibility of the marketing, from the initial resource gathering on the website to filling out that inquiry form.
From there, the collaboration begins to bear fruit. Marketing can create better lead nurture emails if they know from sales what type of content resonates most with a lead in that segment. Meanwhile, marketing can also communicate any information gathered about the lead. This intel might include which emails received the most engagement or which web pages the lead visited. By the time the handoff to sales occurs, this collaboration results in a significantly increased chance of customer conversion.
That’s why, according to one case study, integrating marketing and sales increases ROI by more than one-third. Enhanced lead generation, better audience segmenting, more personalized messaging, and optimized data sharing will increase your lead and customer conversion rates. Ultimately, the result is more revenue at a lower comparative resource investment.
Potential Integration Challenges to Address
Marketing and sales integration tends to be a positive for organizations. However, there is a reason why it has not become commonplace across industries. Significant challenges remain that, for sustainable success, have to be overcome. Some of the most common challenges include:
- Established processes and status quo. Especially for organizations new in the integration game, marketing and sales processes are likely entrenched and can be difficult to change. Just as difficult to change is the mindset. Teams on both sides are easily convinced that their current approach and status quo is functioning “well enough” and should not be upended.
- Data quality in the transition. Successful integration requires in large part accurate data transfer between both areas. When the quality of that data is poor, the intended effort can backfire. Well-intended alignments can lower the customer experience, and at worst can introduce security risks with insecure customer information.
- Quantifying the intangibles. Finally, as organizations rely on aligning their processes, some of the more intangible advantages on each end of the funnel can be lost. Brand awareness campaigns that are not segmented to audiences identified by sales, for example, may be deprioritized in favor of marketing efforts and investments driving results more tangible and quantifiable for revenue.
These challenges do not make integration impossible. They do, however, become crucial to address for any effort to be successful. Fortunately, new technology like artificial intelligence can maximize the chances of a successful sales-marketing integration.
How AI Can Help to Integrate Sales and Marketing
Make no mistake: over the past few years, AI has begun to make a significant impact in both sales and marketing. In a 2023 Bain & Company survey, professionals on both sides highlighted just how significant that impact has become, helping specifically to streamline customer communication, increase access to customer data, and develop more personal messaging.
If those benefits sound eerily similar to the benefits of sales-marketing integration, that’s not a coincidence. In fact, AI can play a significant role in the integration. It may be no surprise, then, that a round table of Forbes Business Council members earlier this year highlighted a few particular use cases of the technology in making that integration happen, including examples like:
- Creating predictive marketing analytics reports using sales data
- Building more seamless customer experience flows that more dynamically address pain points
- Generating more targeted, personalized content based on your data and past history
- Relieving employees of routine tasks, like answering common questions, so they can focus on more strategic initiatives
- Develop a seamless flow of new leads into nurturing campaigns and bottom-funnel outreach
- Leverage data to map out customer journeys, including all sales and marketing touchpoints
All of these examples rely on processes that dynamically run in the background, building tangible advantages for both marketing and sales teams. And there is perhaps no better example of how that process might function than modern, AI-enabled digital assistants.
Using AI-Enabled Digital Assistants to Enhance Marketing and Sales Integration
As generative AI has entered the business mainstream, digital assistants have increased in popularity. Far more than a chatbot, these tools are implemented into your website and text messaging flow, establishing themselves as a constant outlet for members of your target audience just browsing your website or reaching out with specific questions about your products and services.
The right digital assistant becomes a trustworthy aid to your audience. But for the sake of your integration, it also becomes a way to qualify leads, providing the contact information of every user interacting with it. More importantly, it can identify advanced audience insights based on the conversation, which will become crucial points to focus both marketing and sales messaging around.
On a broader level, modern digital assistant platforms can also provide more comprehensive analytics that go beyond individual leads. These analytics allow for advanced insights into the types of questions audiences at different points of the funnel ask, enabling more streamlined communication that focuses specifically on these pain points. Even more advanced is the potential for proactive recommendation, condensing insights into actionable next steps that maximize the chances of engagement and conversion.
And of course, this is a platform designed for the team approach. Members of both marketing and sales teams can gain the same insights, keeping the data quality high-level and enabling for real-time actions that can benefit the entire organization.
Put it all together, and modern AI digital assistants can go a long way toward overcoming the common challenges of sales and marketing integration. That, in turn, enables your organization to reap the full rewards of the concept as you build a more consistent, unified sales funnel that spans all its related functional areas.
To get to that point, you have to find the right platform. That’s where AtlasRTX comes in, thanks to a platform driven to generate positive experiences for customers and advanced data integrations for organizations. Ready to learn more? Request an AtlasRTX demo today.
