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The divide between sales and marketing has been causing problems since the dawn of time. Since the very first time a marketing lead was handed off to a sales team and it didn’t close, sales blamed marketing for an unqualified lead and marketing blamed sales for not closing a good lead. Sales and marketing have charged through business history in silos, leaving a long trail of reduced revenue and damaged brand reputations along the way.
Since day one, the divide between sales and marketing has also caused a data gap leaving one hand blind to what the other is doing. This is particularly true when marketers drive inbound leads to telesales, as differing technologies add another barrier preventing data from being shared. This results in a bad experience for the customer, reduced close rates and revenue, and ultimately, damage to your brand.
Here are three ways that the data disconnect between sales and marketing is damaging your brand and hurting your revenue. And, of course, how you can fix it with a revenue execution platform like Invoca.
Telesales and marketing teams are working toward the same goal, so you’d think they’d share their data with each other. But they rarely do. This results in marketing wasting ad spend on ineffective campaigns and sales facing increased contact center costs from inefficient call handling. Here’s how it happens and how you can fix it.
When the marketing team is blind to what is happening to the calls it’s driving to the contact center, they do the best thing that they can: make assumptions. When someone clicks to call on a mobile ad or calls from a landing page, they’re going to assume that a given percentage convert into sales. If a campaign is driving a high volume of calls, they’ll assume it’s a good thing and double down on it. It’s basically attribution based on assumptions.
And you know what they say about assumptions: they’re a crappy way of attributing offline conversions. Okay, that’s not quite the saying, but the results still stink. Marketers that are blind to this conversion data are usually spending significant budget driving support calls instead of sales calls. This is not only a waste of marketing budget, it costs the contact center big time because they’re spending time transferring calls to support instead of handling hot leads. In turn, this creates longer hold times and a frustrating experience for customers, making them less likely to convert.
On the other hand, if a campaign is effective, the contact center can be caught off guard by a sudden increase in sales calls. This results in them having to keep customers on hold and turn away calls, tanking their conversion rates and frustrating customers.
A prime example is the challenge communications provider Viasat faced when COVID-19 hit North America. With a surge of people working and learning from home, it saw a massive increase in call volume to its call centers. An increase in calls may seem like an unqualified success. However, Viasat services a very niche market and many of the calls it was getting were from unqualified customers.
The increase in call volume impacted the service quality for prospective subscribers and current customers alike as the call center was overwhelmed and sales queues were clogged. They had to begin turning away callers and all callers were experiencing long hold times. “This was very problematic because when coupled with the increased call complexities due to customer concerns surrounding COVID, it led to a troubling ecosystem for our call center,” said David Salcido, director of digital marketing at Viasat.
Using Invoca’s revenue execution platform, Viasat was able to fully integrate its marketing tech stack to get a 360-degree view of the customer journey and mitigate its call volume issues while significantly increasing conversion rates. Get the full case study here to see how they solved this problem with revenue execution technology.
Revenue execution platforms like Invoca enables marketing and telesales teams to break down data silos and work more effectively together. The benefits include:
Get an Invoca demo to learn more about how it can drive your sales and marketing team alignment.
Poor alignment between sales and marketing creates bad experiences that drive your customers to the competition. Our research shows that 76% of customers will stop doing business with a brand after just a single bad interaction.
The contact center could be handling calls from customers who are calling because they’re frustrated with the online experience, leaving the contact center to answer questions and handle transactions that customers actually want to complete online. It’s a pain for the customers and far more expensive to convert them in the contact center than it is online.
All too often, knowledge of these problems will stay in the contact center. Marketing, eCommerce, and customer experience teams may only hear about them once the damage to your brand’s good name is done and customers have clicked away to a new brand that can provide a smoother experience. To create and maintain great customer experiences, you need a shared platform in place that can signal problems to all teams in real time.
The best way to create great experiences for your customers and build customer loyalty is with first-party data from customer conversations. Here's how using a revenue execution platform gives teams in sales, marketing, eCommerce, and customer experience the data they need to acquire and retain more happy customers:
When marketing doesn’t know the results of their campaigns, they are much more likely to deliver low-quality leads to sales. This results in low conversion rates for sales and higher acquisition costs for marketing. A lack of visibility into the contact center can also cause marketing to overestimate their acquisition costs, since the conversions that happen over the phone are not being accurately attributed. We’ve found that marketers overestimate their CPA by an average of 46%.
Conversion rates also get dinged because sales doesn’t have any context about what is driving the calls from the digital side, so they treat every call the same way. It’s an inefficient way to handle calls and customers will not get the personalized attention they deserve, resulting in fewer conversions.
Revenue execution platforms provide complete visibility of the buyer’s journey to both sales and marketing teams, allowing for accurate measurement of marketing success and the context sales needs to close more leads. Here's how it works:
Is your team struggling to track fragmented, multi-channel customer journeys? Revenue execution platforms are the missing link: they tie together online and offline customer journeys, allowing your marketing and sales teams to create seamless experiences. When you deliver exceptional customer experiences, sales and revenue growth follow.
Get The Forrester Wave: Real-Time Revenue Execution Platforms Q2 2024 report here to learn more about the value you can expect from a real-time revenue execution platform.
