Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success
Did you know that sales, marketing, and customer success should all access the same customer data? When these teams can work together effectively, it’s called a “unified customer view.” A unified customer view provides a complete picture of each customer, which allows for more personalized interactions and higher conversion rates. In this article, we will discuss why it is so important for these teams to have access to the same data and how it can benefit your business.
One of the most important benefits is that a unified customer view allows you to provide a more personalized experience for your customers. Internal to the organization, the unified customer view aligns your go-to-market teams with the appropriate information about the customers within their purchasing lifecycle. With complete information on each customer, you can anticipate their needs and offer them products or services they are more likely to have an interest. This ability to anticipate leads to higher conversion rates and, ultimately more sales.
What is unified data?
Unified customer data is a customer database that contains all customer information in one place and includes data from business applications such as sales, marketing, and customer success. When new information comes from the customer or a person entering information into a CRM system, data begins flowing into the database to be translated, accumulated, and formatted, so that information about the customer is up to date and actionable. This actionable information leads to more effective communication and collaboration between teams and each customer interaction. Note that unified data doesn’t mean that all teams have to use the same database for everything; instead, their customer relationship management applications (CRMs) update and are updated by a customer data platform (CDP). Unified data means that your IT systems are running aligned.
There are many benefits to having unified customer views. Big ones that lay at the heart of generating revenue for business include:
– Increased customer retention: When your teams access the same customer data, they can better understand the customer’s needs and pain points. This access allows you to address these issues more quickly and effectively, which leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. With loyal customers spending 67% more than new customers
– Improved customer acquisition: With a unified customer view, your teams can identify potential customers that are a good fit for your products or services. This insight helps to improve your customer acquisition rate and grow your business.
– Increased efficiency: When teams have access to the same customer data, they can avoid duplicate work and save time—this l to increased efficiency and productivity within your organization.
– Improved customer insights: Having a unified customer view allows you to gain valuable insights into your customers and help you to make better decisions about your marketing and sales strategies.
Aligning your Salesforce and Marketing
Keeping your sales and marketing team aligned requires constant work. In every organization I have ever consulted, sales representatives don’t trust the quality of marketing qualified leads (MQL) that marketers find and engage for them. This mistrust leads to discontent and misalignment in the effort to make sales. Instead of building relationships with MQLs, sales representatives research and develop relationships with businesses they find themselves in. Duplicate work explodes, and your defined target customer is just an interpretation. More real-time insights about your target customer segments and how they differ in needs can help clear up the misalignment in working sessions that refine rules. When sales and marketing go back to review what’s working, they can also pull from the same set of facts – and must better align.
To keep your sales and marketing teams aligned, your business must prioritize having a unified customer view allowing both teams to access the same customer data and get a complete picture of each customer and how they interact with the business. With this information, they can work together more effectively to improve the customer experience (CX) and generate more revenue for your business. In fact, with just a CRM alone, 74% of users said the system gave them improved access to customer data.
How Unified Data Benefits Customer Success
Customer success teams ensure customers can use your product or service and get value from it. They work closely with customers to help them achieve their goals. To be successful, customer success teams need to have a deep understanding of the customer, like how much the customer has used the product or Is this customer one of our loyal customers? This critical information includes knowing what they are trying to accomplish at that particular time.
Customer success means more than onboarding and support but also customer retention. Applications like Zendesk capture support incidents and customer questions. The insights related to customer churn come straight from these applications to understand how to lead customers to greater success.
When your sales and marketing teams are aligned, it’s important that customer success also has access to this customer data. This access allows customer success managers to see which customers are at risk and take steps to prevent churn.
How to build a unified customer view
We touched upon the function of CDPs to achieve a unified customer view. Salesforce and Segment are some of the most popular CDPs on the market amongst large enterprise businesses. It offers a complete CRM solution that includes features for sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Because Salesforce Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud are sold as walled gardens, data alignment becomes easier; however, inevitably, your business will need to integrate other applications your customer teams need. Nowadays, businesses use over 20 applications to run their businesses; CRMs and CDPs are components of the go-to-market delivery or the Marketing Technology Stack (MarTech Stack)
If you want to improve your sales, marketing, and customer success strategies, consider investing in a CDP. A unified customer view can benefit your business in many ways and help you better understand and serve your customers.
A unified customer view is essential for businesses that want to provide a personalized experience for their customers. By accessing the same data, sales, marketing, and customer success teams can work together to anticipate customer needs and create offers that are more likely to convert. If you want to improve your customer retention rates and boost your bottom line, implementing a unified customer view should be at the top of your list.
