What's the one thing you can do this year that will have the biggest impact on both your sales and marketing teams? The answer is simple: stop working in a silo and start integrating your sales and marketing resources. By synchronizing your email marketing data with your customer relationship management system, you'll be improving communication, customer relations and company efficiency.

Don't want to integrate? The downsides of staying in the silo are plentiful - and potentially damaging to your business.

The Danger of the Silo

Your marketing team wishes they had access to the sales data to better target their communications. The sales team wishes they weren't the last to know when an email marketing campaign had been delivered. Both teams are communicating with the same prospects on different levels, and each of their software systems contain valuable information that the other team could really use.

If this describes your business, you are not alone - in many organizations, sales and marketing activities take place in their own separate silos. Data and information must be painstakingly and tediously imported and exported between the two programs, increasing the chance of data corruption in the process. Or even worse, data must be manually entered into to different systems, making updates painful and increasing the opportunity for human error.

The pain of working in silos also affects your customers. Imagine for a moment that Ted Smith just hit the 'unsubscribe' button on your newsletter and opted out from receiving email communications from your company. Wouldn't that be good for your sales manager to know before she hits 'send' on the sales email she's just getting ready to send him? Probably so. But unless your email marketing software automatically updates your CRM software when events like unsubscribes occur, your sales manager will be in the dark...until she gets Ted's angry email.

What about a Workaround?

There has been no shortage of companies trying to create workarounds in order to combine their sales and marketing data. Some businesses will hire expensive IT consultants to engineer custom API solutions to get their two programs talking to each other. This solution is time consuming and tricky, oftentimes with less-than-ideal results.

Other businesses will buy into a hybrid solution - either an email service program that has some semblance of lead tracking functionality added on, or a CRM program that has basic email functionality. But the reality is that none of these solutions are ideal. For mid-sized businesses that need to send out to lists of 1000+ recipients and want access to professionally designed templates, personalization, testing & pre-scheduling services, continuing to count on your email service provider (i.e. Lyris HQ) to handle your mass mailing needs is your best bet, and tracking your sales leads in a proven CRM system (i.e. Salesforce CRM) makes the most sense.

Integration is the Solution

It's clear that there is a serious need to combine your marketing and sales functionality. But how do you do it? Through professional integration. By integrating your ESP with Salesforce.com or your CRM of choice, you have one single database of record for your CRM and email marketing, and all of your information can be easily and seamlessly shared back and forth between the two departments.

The Benefits of Integration for Sales and Marketing

Integration has a number of advantages for both sales and marketing teams. Integration will provide the sales team with a "big picture" view of larger company marketing campaigns. This means that they can better time their sales conversations by understanding what offers and messages have recently been shared with prospects. The sales team can focus their efforts on the prospects that marketing analytics show to be the most engaged and responsive to email marketing campaigns.

Marketers benefit, too. By having access to this synchronized data, the marketing team has a clearer understanding of which messages and campaigns are having the biggest impact on the bottom line, allowing them to target their email messages even more effectively. By taking advantage of this data, the marketing team can further segment email lists in their ESP where personalized email messages and scheduled campaigns are easy to set up and implement, rather than trying to create a workaround within the sales program. And while the sales team is focused on closing hot leads, marketing can focus on nurturing the warm leads via trigger campaigns and other communications until the prospects are closer to making a purchase.

An Investment in Integration is an Investment in Success

Article Source: http://www.ArticleBlast.com