Marketing and Sales often have a rocky relationship, especially when sales dip and blame is cast. The best partnerships happen when marketing understands its reliance on sales to close deals, and sales acknowledges that their success hinges on effective marketing. Together, they can create a powerful customer acquisition strategy.
One major issue in aligning these teams is Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) data. While CRMs are primarily for sales, they hold critical insights for marketing. Often, marketers deal with incomplete or inconsistent data because sales teams aren’t aware of how their actions impact lead volume and quality. Effective, data-driven marketing relies on strong feedback loops that require accurate data to allocate budgets effectively and generate high-quality leads.
Sales teams often focus on closing deals and overlook how their choices affect marketing's pipeline-building efforts. The fact is, marketing is reliant on input from the sales team, so if you want your sales team closing more deals, it’s important they understand the impact they can have from top of the funnel.
Here are the most commonly neglected sales data points for marketing optimization:
Unique Identifiers: A common problem is the lack of a clear connection between different stages in the funnel. For example, if a lead uses a personal email and later provides a work email, overwriting the original creates gaps in marketing's tracking.
Lead Quality: Immediate access to lead quality data allows marketers to adjust campaigns, driving more relevant leads and filtering out time-wasters with real-time optimization. With today's AI-driven bidding and targeting algorithms, that feedback can start having direct impact on lead quality within 24 hours.
Deal Status & Value: Promptly marking closed-won deals and sharing their value gives marketing direct feedback on lead value, which informs audience pricing and budget allocation for future leads.
Time Stamps: Being able to predict when value will be realized, in addition to what that value will be, allows the marketing teams to make informed decisions with incomplete data. Including timestamps for each funnel stage enables marketing to build accurate predictive models, leading to more high-quality leads sooner.
Original Attribution Information: Proper attribution isn’t about credit; it’s about understanding what drives results. Sales teams should avoid overwriting attribution data based on lead sourcing, as this can skew performance analyses and mask critical insights.
For better collaboration and outcomes, help your sales team adopt the following practices:
Always add new information instead of overwriting existing data, e.g., add work email rather than overwriting their original personal email.
Keep data current and complete with statuses, values, and timestamps.
Avoid manual data entry; convert leads to contacts instead of typing in new information to avoid introducing inconsistencies that break connections in optimization tools.
Communicate changes in processes or campaigns to ensure alignment. Both teams should be responsible for sharing significant changes in audience targeting, messaging, pricing, and process to avoid wasted value in a misaligned funnel.
Address any misalignments directly, as both teams share the goal of improving lead quality and volume.