Learn Why Marketing Engagement Becomes Sales Success
Imagine a world where marketing and sales teams share a platform to collaborate and win business, a platform that uses the same data to calculate KPIs, with the same customer data points and segmentation, and where business processes work across every department.
During this year’s Sugar Market Bootcamp, we’ve heard from three SugarCRM leaders from both teams—sales and marketing—on how the Sugar platform successfully encompasses all that and what the future of market automation looks like.
Our Common Goals: New Customers
We, as our sales and marketing groups, have become more sophisticated in the way that we’re selling, and integration has become critical. “If you are leaning into a marketing automation platform that can’t talk to your CRM, ideally, Sugar Sell, then you probably need to take a long hard look”, says Clare Dorrian, CMO at SugarCRM.
Undoubtedly, when the two are intertwined, you can focus on doing what you do best, which is driving campaigns that engage your customers and prospects, and allowing sales to sell.
What Makes the CMO Happy?
“What makes me happy? Being a part of conversations with the folks in sales who are very much our partners in crime, and talking about the quality pipeline, that they have high degrees of confidence in closing. That makes me happy.“
Clare strongly believes that good collaboration with sales is a measure of her team’s success in one dimension. “And I think that something else that makes me personally very happy is speed and creativity. Speed because when you are a mid-market business, in a market of Goliath, like we are, like, ironically, our prospects likely are, it’s one of the advantages that you have. And so when I can see that we have had an idea, and we collaborated with the right people to mobilize the go-to market, and I see that idea turned into a message, a set of content, a set of assets, a set of slides, a robust integrated campaign, and at the back of that, you see strong engagement, strong pipeline, and revenue fall out of it. I mean, there’s no better feeling. Because you’re helping your business grow.”
How Marketing Engagement Becomes Sales Success
Jason Rushforth, Americas SVP & GM at SugarCRM, strongly believes the pipeline is the foundation and the bedrock for everything we sell. Without the pipeline, we cannot get revenue. And where does the pipeline come from? “In our world, it comes from three different distinct places. We have a marketing pipeline, we have a sales pipeline that’s generated and self-generated by our sales organizations. And then, we have partners that generate pipeline and bring it to us and we can work with them to procure revenue from it.” Sales and marketing alignment is critical to driving that much-needed pipeline that ultimately results in revenue.
How Often Do Sales Talk to Marketing?
Jason talks with Clare on a regular basis. “I talk to marketing every single day of my life. And I talk to them in a variety of different capacities because of the importance of the pipeline to Sugar. […] And we’re talking about all sorts of different things from initiatives we’re running, to ABM programs, to the health of the pipeline, where we see deficiencies, how we’re going to solve for those deficiencies.”
Sugar Market + Sell Working Together
For Jia Rae, Digital Marketing Director at SugarCRM, feedback is her favorite part of working with sales. “I’m sitting here, looking at data and metrics, and then coming up with creative campaigns and figuring out how I’m gonna position X, Y, or Z. And all I’m looking at is quantitative metrics. I will never have qualitative metrics without hearing from the field.”
“The reason that we’re in Sugar Sell looking at the data versus Sugar Market, is because we want to have a single source of truth.[…] Shared data means everyone’s speaking the same language.” And CRM is that single source of truth.
How Do You Use Sugar Sell?
Jia uses Sugar Sell every single day, every minute of every day. ”I am constantly looking at our dashboards. There’s a digital dashboard I look at every single day, as well as an ABM dashboard. I’m looking at the leads, opportunities, pipeline, and closed-won revenue and I’m able to see just what’s working for our business and what’s not so that I can understand where to put the budget and where to maybe move the budget away.”
When marketing and sales teams work together, you get ahead of the buying cycle and truly understand your customer’s needs and expectations.
SugarCRM makes the hard things easy for sales and marketing by adding more value, providing real solutions for your business challenges, and offering a path to accelerate growth. If you want to learn more, get a demo to see the Sugar platform in action.
