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  • November 22, 2024
  • By Linda Pophal, business journalist and content marketer

The Keys to CRM and Interdepartmental Alignment

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Imagine that a recent call from a disgruntled client has made it all too apparent that there is a disconnect, or lack of alignment, between departments when it comes to CRM. According to the client, your sales team made promises about product features that they later learned were still in development—and far from an actual release date; the support team has been slow in responding to their issues, or entirely nonresponsive; and the product team has consistently missed the mark on their needs, even though they’ve been quite vocal.

These are the kinds of disconnects that can be all too common between teams charged with meeting various aspects of prospect or customer needs. Understanding when and how prospects and customers are reaching out to the company for information and support, the kind of support they’re receiving, what they’re purchasing, how much they’re purchasing, when they last purchased, how much they owe, and their levels of satisfaction are all critical pieces of information that can be used to further cement, or further erode, the customer relationship.

From a company standpoint, having accurate, up-to-date, reliable, and secure information about the customer journey can remove inefficiencies, drive productivity, and ensure a strong revenue stream and customer retention. To get there, though, companies need to have confidence that the data housed in their CRM systems and shared between departments is being accurately and efficiently entered and used to communicate with customers and make critical business decisions.

“Cross-functional alignment makes the entire business much leaner,” says Prashanth “PVK” Krishnaswami, global head of market strategy and thought leadership for customer experience at Zoho. “The company is able to go to market faster with newer or improved versions of its offerings. It’s able to understand the market and make those refinements faster and more accurately.”

Alignment, Krishnaswami says, makes it easier for companies of any size to quickly correct course according to market changes. “It reduces the gap between planning and execution. As a result, it creates a substantial amount of efficiency in everything the company does.”

Michelle Tilton, vice president of marketing at Gryphon.ai, says that this kind of alignment “enables a single source of truth about the business, its customers, and overall company health.” It’s important, she says, to have reliable information on products, customer product usage, financial and billing information, and more to ensure employees have access to “the current state of customer usage and payment,” and a 360-degree view of the customer.

Unfortunately, cross-functional alignment doesn’t always occur, and it certainly doesn’t occur by chance. Companies often find themselves faced with some critical disconnects that can challenge both efficiency and customer service.

The Critical Disconnects

Ian Reeves, managing director of Flourish, a specialist CRM agency in the United Kingdom, says, “One of the biggest challenges we see in alignment between CRM systems and other internal systems is between marketing and customer service teams. The sharing of data between these two teams is a fundamental requirement to delivering best-in-class customer service.”

Imagine, Reeves suggests, a scenario where a customer has an open customer service complaint about a faulty product, and before that complaint is resolved, he receives marketing communications. That’s likely to be an all-too-common scenario in many organizations. These types of communications, he says, tend to annoy customers and are more likely to lead to their loss than to another purchase.

That’s just one example. These types of disconnects can occur across and between many departments, potentially leading to the following:

  • Different departments use a variety of different systems that are not connected, leading to inconsistent and incomplete customer information.
  • Disjointed, inefficient workflows waste precious time and financial resources.
  • Opportunities for cross-selling and upselling are missed.
  • Efforts are duplicated, as multiple individuals or teams reach out to the same customers.
  • There is a lack of insights into the customer journey.

The bottom line is a poor customer experience, which might also include compliance risks, especially in industries with strict regulatory requirements for the management and protection of customer data.

Lack of alignment can be driven by both people- and technology-related issues, including the following:

  • siloed departments and teams;
  • poor communication channels;
  • conflicting priorities;
  • lack of a unified vision or strategy;
  • outdated or inadequate technology;
  • different departments using different tools;
  • complex integration requirements;
  • poor data quality; and
  • inadequate training and adoption.

It’s a long list fraught with the complexity of trying to coordinate a wide range of people and processes across increasingly complex organizations.

As today’s organizations increasingly rely on internal collaboration platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Asana, and others, it’s critical that these platforms are aligned with their CRM systems. Ensuring and sustaining this alignment can lead to important benefits for employees, their organizations, and, perhaps most importantly, their prospects and customers.

The truth of the matter is that, given today’s ready access to a wide range of advanced CRM technology, it’s not only the technology itself that creates challenges and bottlenecks—it’s also the people using the technology.

CRM and Internal Collaboration Platforms

CRM systems are supposed to help companies manage and analyze customer interactions and data across the customer’s life cycle and across the organization, ensuring accounting for all touchpoints. Internal collaboration platforms help employees communicate and share information with each other to expedite their work through such activities as instant messaging, file sharing, task management, and video-conferencing.

Integration between these systems ensures that the transfer of information is seamless between customer-facing teams and internal departments, that consistent and accurate information is being shared and accessed, and that efficiencies are gained.

Alignment requires “a set of shared, measurable goals; a transparent system for communication; and the most appropriate technology platform or platforms,” Krishnaswami says.

There are plenty of platforms from which to choose. Some of the most popular include the following:

  • Salesforce integrations (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams)
  • HubSpot integrations (e.g., Zoom, Asana)
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 integrations (e.g., SharePoint, Yammer)
  • Zoho CRM integrations (e.g., Workplace by Facebook, Trello)

The right platform, Krishnaswami says, “can single-handedly make or break” interdepartmental alignment. Choosing a CRM built for cross-functional work orchestration, he says, is very important. “A good technology platform must offer a robust set of core capabilities to power the most common cross-functional use cases in the company, a practical layer of extensibility that allows business users to adopt and customize the platform to suit their team’s needs, and a reliable support system to lean on during challenging times of change.”

Using CRM with other tools like enterprise resource planning, specific marketing systems, contact centers, telephony, email, and conversational messaging tools are crucial elements impacting the customer experience, says Nitin Seth, founder and CEO of SMS Magic.

“Integration is a crucial piece, and it’s important to know the role of each system, its data architecture, output, and usage, as well as the downstream and upstream data integration and the effect on the overall data flow,” Seth says. That data integration, he says further, can be complex and challenging.

Overcoming these challenges, Seth continues, requires a good architect to design the strategy and see the execution through based on a thorough understanding of business priorities and the needs of users.

“Large CRM vendors like Salesforce, HubSpot, and [Microsoft] are built specifically to make integrations easy for other technologies,” Tilton says. “Leveraging open APIs, developers can spend less time writing code or developing in a specific language. These large CRMs frequently integrate with conversation intelligence tools, billing software, document management systems, business intelligence and analytics tools, project management systems, internal knowledge base hubs, support ticketing applications, and many more.”

So let’s assume that your CRM and collaboration platforms are up-to-date and technologically sound and that they allow integration with key information systems. What additional best practices are critical to ensure successful implementation? As we’ll see, many of these revolve around the “people” aspects of alignment.

Best Practices for Implementation

Effectively leveraging the power of CRMs and ensuring interdepartmental alignment requires a thorough understanding of both customer and company needs, policies and standards, strong collaboration, ongoing training, and continuous improvement.

It all begins with a thorough needs assessment. “Alignment has to start with what’s important to the customer,” Krishnaswami says.

Tilton agrees and says that it’s critical for companies “to fully define and scope the problem they are trying to solve.” Many organizations, she says, begin to integrate technology without fully understanding the use cases and outcomes they are looking to achieve. This can create challenges within the integration, subsequent rollout, and long-term adoption.

For example, she says, “after a sales call, an agent can be coached by leadership through AI-assisted post-call analysis. Or during a servicing call, the agent has the support ticket information right at her fingertips. Once an organization knows what it’s trying to achieve, the subsequent integration becomes much clearer.”

Taking a comprehensive approach to project design and including all key stakeholders in scoping at the beginning of any new integration initiative can help companies avoid these challenges and roll out an integration between platforms that truly provides measurable value for their organizations, Tilton says. This, she adds, “includes providing a better overall customer experience, improved operational efficiencies, and increased employee satisfaction.”

Tilton also notes that “agile implementation helps with overall challenges as well and assures that each step of the integration is validated and makes minor shifts in scope much more feasible.”

As they consider their own needs and those of their customers, organizations must also develop specific and clear data governance policies to inform how employees collect, enter, access, and use this information.

Clear data governance policies are also crucial, experts agree.

Data governance clarifies data ownership and responsibilities across departments. This includes standards for data quality and cleansing and data security measures to protect sensitive company and customer information.

Jeff Rosenthal, head of CRM go-to-market strategies for North America at Monday.com, recommends the following best practices for bringing silos of work together in a way that will improve accuracy, reliability, and efficiency:

  • Integrate data into CRM to reduce manual entry and synchronize systems in real time.
  • Standardize data definitions for context, quality, and consistency from one system to another.
  • Have clear roles and responsibilities across departments that clarify needs and expectations when work is handed off within and outside of CRM.
  • Automate processes to streamline repetitive tasks. This allows teams to focus on higher-value activities like working on top deals.
  • When introducing new tools or processes, implement a structured change management strategy to ensure smooth adoption and buy-in from all stakeholders.

The integrity and security of data are critically important for organizations of all kinds, including Metal Marker Manufacturing, an Ohio-based maker of metal tags, nameplates, labels, decals, and related items. “Keeping data secure was a major concern, which we addressed with strong data protection measures,” recalls David Primrose, its president. The company set up rules for data management and introduced its new system in stages to help manage complexity. “To prevent information from being trapped in separate departments, we used tools to connect different data sources and established clear rules for sharing information across the company,” Primrose says.

As people work together, it’s important for them to understand how others use information in their work, the challenges they face, and the opportunities they can identify and leverage. Alignment between these teams, as we’ve seen, can significantly contribute to organizational success.

Cross-functional teams should include representatives from departments like sales, marketing, customer service, IT, legal, and others—in short, any teams involved in providing, accessing, or protecting the integrity and security of customer-related information.

There should be clear roles and responsibilities for team members and clarity about which communication channels will be used and meeting timing and standards.

“Leaders must commit to transparently communicating their opinions, plans, goals, and roadblocks to each other,” Krishnaswami says. “This requires a culture that encourages candidness and clarity over vanity and ego.”

It’s important, he also says, for leaders to come together to decide on a shared set of goals relating to their areas of shared responsibility. “Teams that see the interdepartmental impact of their work remain aligned.”

Cross-functional alignment, Krishnaswami says, can make the entire business much leaner.

Training, of course, is critical to help employees understand how to use systems and to ensure that they’re following best practices for gathering and using the data that is housed in those systems to serve customer needs and make sound business decisions.

Ongoing training helps to ensure that employees are continually updated on their roles in ensuring data accuracy and protection and the efficient use of that data to drive customer needs and organizational objectives.

Training should be role-specific to ensure that different department needs and expectations are clear. User guides and documentation can help ensure that employees have access to accurate information when and where they need it. Similarly, offering training in both in-person and online formats can help accommodate varying learning styles and schedules.

The training process should include ample opportunity for feedback and two-way communication. Companies need to understand where employees encounter roadblocks, issues they might not fully understand, and new impacts on how they do their work based on customer needs. Adopting a culture of continuous optimization and improvement can help ensure that systems constantly evolve and improve to meet these needs.

And then, establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and monitor alignment can help continually assess the success of integration. In addition, regularly gathering feedback from both users and customers can help identify areas for improvement.

“Keep in mind that successful alignment is an ongoing process that requires constant adjustment to changing business needs and new technologies,” Primrose stresses. “By treating our central system as a key company asset and continuously improving our approach based on expert advice and our own experiences, we achieved a level of coordination between departments that directly improves our bottom line through increased efficiency and customer satisfaction.”

Among the many challenges in carrying out these efforts are data quality and consistency issues, organizational readiness, ethical considerations, potential AI bias, integration with other systems, and the balance between human and AI roles in customer interactions. These challenges add another layer of complexity to what has already been a complex matrix of tech systems, people, and customers.

Overcoming them will require ongoing needs assessments, clear data governance policies, cross-functional teams, comprehensive training, and processes for continuous optimization and improvement.

Data drives business decisions more than ever before. Ensuring alignment between the systems that house that data and the people who use it is critical. The right combination of technology and an ongoing commitment to effective collaboration can position companies to remain competitive and nimble. 

Linda Pophal is a freelance business journalist and content marketer who writes for various business and trade publications. Pophal does content marketing for Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and individuals on a wide range of subjects, from human resource management and employee relations to marketing, technology, healthcare industry trends, and more.

 

Marketing, Sales Need Better Alignment

While 82 percent of senior company executives say that marketing and sales are aligned at their companies, new data from Forrester Research shows that 65 percent of lower-level sales and marketing professionals don’t see it. In fact, 61 percent of sales and 69 percent of marketing professionals, respectively, agree that there is a lack of communication between teams.

“Most B2B executives say their marketing and sales teams are aligned, but they’re not,” Forrester says. “Most marketers and sellers say there is a substantial lack of alignment.”

“Some executives may be disconnected from lower-level realities,” says John Arnold, Forrester principal analyst and lead author of the report. “They just assume that everything is working. They have no evidence of misalignment.”

Many businesses are discussing alignment, with both positive and negative experiences in the conversations, while many others aren’t even looking at the problem or are doing nothing to address it. “The most surprising thing that we found was the complexity involved in alignment,” Arnold says.

Part of the reason is that companies don’t have a good definition of alignment between sales and marketing, according to Arnold. Those organizations have marketing and advertising co-dependency that is masquerading as alignment.

“There’s one dominant function and one dependent function,” Arnold explains. “And executives at these firms think that as long as there is no friction, marketing and sales must be in alignment.”

But sometimes there is no friction because marketing and sales are completely siloed, he added.

Leaders must rethink marketing and sales alignment and prepare now for a future of functional ambiguity and potential role reversals, where empowered buyers, converging technology, and advanced sales and marketing automation are blurring traditional roles and responsibilities, Forrester cautions in the report.

The report outlines four paradigms for marketers and sellers to increase alignment:

Proportionate relationships. Contrasting marketing and sales expertise in proportionate relationships will help companies grow. According to Forrester, this model is best for B2B companies that can benefit from debating different points of view to achieve corporate goals.

However, the research firm cautions that leaders in proportionate relationships need to continually manage and arbitrate disagreements to make the marketing-sales partnership work in this scenario.

Siloed marketing and sales. While in some organizations, silos prevent collaboration, in other organizations, siloed marketing and sales works best, according to Arnold. Purposeful silos can liberate subfunctions from unnecessary dependencies, the report says.

“Not all silos are inherently bad,” the report explains. “But all should be deliberate when partnership is the goal. For example, there may be some autonomous marketing teams in some parts of the organization running brand campaigns to boost investor confidence that have little to do with a particular sales organization’s pipeline generation goals.”

In those kinds of organizations, clearly defined partnership agreements must spell out the degree of autonomy between marketing and sales.

Subservient. Under this paradigm, subfunctions set expectations for support between marketing and sales. The report explains that subservient teams have little contrast between each other. They do a job on behalf of a key stakeholder without reporting to that stakeholder.

“Leaders should create partnership agreements between subservient functions to set the levels of contrast and collaboration necessary to produce quality work for each set of stakeholders,” Forrester recommends.

Assimilated. Under this paradigm, subfunctions keep some teams focused on doing one main job together. This happens when the differences between marketing and sales functions blur and leaders collapse teams for better collaboration or process improvements.

There are always temptations to assimilate teams to achieve better integrated processes, the research firm says, but it also warns that doing so can mute contrasting points of view.

—Phillip Britt

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