The productivity between your sales and outbound marketing team reached an all-time low. In a desperate attempt to turn things around and boost both productivity and profit, you quickly turn to the latest CRM to enhance the latest and greatest inbound marketing strategies. You’re positive that a sales automation platform combined with inbound and outbound marketing solutions will surely make a difference in your business.
Or will it?
Unfortunately, this is a case that OMI sees year after year. With the new year coming upon us, many companies are looking to cut costs and execute new technologies to help with the bottom line, only to find that their sales are falling short. If you’ve invested in a new CRM that’s complete with marketing automation and sales automation, it’s mind-boggling to think that your sales and marketing teams are sailing on a sinking ship.
The Problem Behind Your Sales and Marketing Productivity
The truth is that multiple point solutions are killing sales and marketing productivity. Every year, new technologies are released that promise the world in terms of boosting productivity and giving marketers the best bang for their buck.
Although the idea of inbound marketing and outbound marketing automation is to increase sales, this is typically the last thing that happens during the sales and marketing strategies. If this sounds all too familiar, the good news is that you aren’t alone.
The bottom line is that your CRM can certainly enhance sales and marketing productivity, but not when your team is constantly chasing the carrot and attempting to reinvent the wheel.
The Real Way to Increase Productivity with Sales and Marketing
We admit it—there are many CRMs on the market with a lot of bells and whistles. While this may look like a dream come true to your sales and marketing teams, the truth is that it only serves as a distraction that interrupts the overall process. Not all services are easy and meaningful for business.
When you’re choosing a CRM to help with sales and marketing automation, it doesn’t always come down to picking the platform with the most bells and whistles. It won’t do your employees any good at all if they need to spend hundreds of hours learning the platform from scratch.
The bigger downside is that those hours will come straight from your payroll. As your marketing and sales teams learn their way around the new platform, your inbound marketing and outbound marketing efforts will fall flat. After all, it’s quite difficult to learn a new CRM while keeping up with consistent sales and marketing processes at the same time.
Stick to What Works and Shorten the Learning Curve
Although there are nearly endless ways to help enhance the productivity of your sales and marketing teams, there are several tried and true methods that can give you a significant ROI with the right CRM platform.
The right CRM will serve as a sales and marketing cloud to combine the efforts of each department, which makes the process run as smoothly as possible. This way, your team can focus on things that matter, such as social selling.
The good news is that companies no longer need to waste tens of thousands of dollars on software that doesn’t work for their business. Unless your team can quickly learn the CRM and start using its features, it will remain the shiny new object that promises to bring in more leads.
Unfortunately, this is typically where things end abruptly. Your team will diligently work endless hours to learn the new software as leads and sales slip by, leaving you frustrated and with fewer dollars in your bank account.
How Can You Increase Productivity for Good?
The best way to increase productivity is to quit wasting money on every new technology that is released on the market. This is especially the case with third-party software that tries to serve as a one-size-fits-all solution for sales and marketing automation.
You’re a unique company with your own set of goals to reach. This isn’t to say that some third-party freeware won’t make a difference, but you simply won’t get the same results by using a platform not customized for your needs.
Partner to Get Things Done & Enhance Marketing Productivity
When you don’t want 2017 to be another year of wasted time on the next best thing, OMI provides top-of-the-line consulting, best practices and platform enhancements to allow you to leverage current technologies that are underused or not properly configured for your business case. No longer will your team need to bother with complicated one off solutions that clog up your daily workflow and drain sales.
Big gains come from simple adjustments in your CRM and supporting technologies that you already own. Focus on improving the sales and marketing process to achieve the best return on investments you made last year!
To learn more about OMI’s CRM Practice Group and Salesforce.com solutions, contact us today.