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Web collaboration technologies enable individuals and organizations to meet online, present information, share critical data and demonstrate products to increase productivity, decrease costs, expand reach and generate revenue. Sales and marketing teams are increasingly making these tools an integral part of their business processes, to allow faster and better execution of business goals. More specifically, Web collaboration is helping sales and marketing teams cost-effectively generate more leads and close more deals. Sales professionals are using Web collaboration to reach more prospects, interact with geographically dispersed clients, reduce sales cycles, create targeted sales messages, cross-sell, up-sell and generate more revenue per closed deal. Marketing teams are planning, developing and successfully executing marketing programs using the real-time and interactive capabilities offered by Web collaboration. As a result, they are able to pump up lead generation and create meaningful sales leads faster than before.
KEY COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES FOR SALES AND MARKETING ORGANIZATIONS
Today’s sales and marketing leaders are encountering an array of new challenges, ranging from increased competition to fewer resources to rapidly changing markets. Sales and marketing success relies on creating effective customer-centric processes that improve the quality, execution and impact of the materials they create and the activities they perform on a daily basis. Competition is intense, and buyers are skeptical. Being able to get a prospect’s attention and turn it into a successful sale is an enormous task. And while sales and marketing share a common goal, and their complementary roles can fuel increased revenues for a company, sales and marketing typically act as two very separate organizations. Both could benefit from increased collaboration.
The traditional sales model has undergone a tremendous metamorphosis. Today’s selling environments are complex, requiring a change in the go-to-market model. Sales leaders must design new ways to meld emerging techniques with highly targeted messages. They’re moving away from the conventional linear model – prospect, qualify, present and close – to a more dynamic and accelerated customer-centric focus, in which sales professionals engage in a collaborative decision-making process with their customers.
Sales teams today are facing several interrelated challenges, including the need to:
- Increase sales-team productivity so sales professionals can reach more prospects more often and in less time
- Extend their reach to geographically dispersed prospects and customers while reducing operational costs
- Create highly targeted sales messages that engage key decision makers
- Provide a collaborative sales process in which customers can offer feedback and interact with sales professionals to devise solutions that specifically address their business needs
- Lay the framework to build strong, long-lasting customer relationships to create a funnel for cross-selling and up-selling
- Promote a team-selling approach and foster communication among sales regions, reps and managers
- Maximize efficiency to close more deals more quickly
MARKETERS MUST GET THE MESSAGE OUT
Of course, in the end, sales teams need leads to succeed — and effective marketing can be a lead-generating machine. Marketing uncovers sales opportunities by contacting and cultivating influencers and decision drivers, often in places the sales team hasn’t gone. Done right, marketing shortens the sales process by delivering the information that prospects need to make their buying decision quickly and efficiently. And yet, from the perspective of today’s media-savvy customer, marketing messages often appear tiresome and trite. Companies must develop a message that’s both informative and sincere. Today’s highly competitive business climate is intensifying marketing’s key challenges, which include the need to:
- Dramatically increase productivity to feed the sales pipeline with more leads in less time, while simultaneously reducing the cost of marketing efforts
- Reach geographically dispersed, formerly unreachable prospects using emerging technologies and marketing techniques
- Gain better intelligence through precise targeting, to successfully pre-qualify leads and give sales teams contextual information on new opportunities that can result in higher sales conversion
- Accelerate time-to-market, as product and technology life cycles get shorter
- Work more effectively with sales teams through timely collaboration and information sharing
- Build a stronger, better differentiated brand
- Optimize and demonstrate ROI to better align marketing goals with business goals and contribute to the bottom line
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