We’ve explained how Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service are the crucial three revenue growth drivers in any company and why Sales and Marketing should align. A good lead process starts in marketing, gets handed off to sales, requires an excellent customer experience, and then the subject of continuous, relevant, helpful contact from each department as relevant.
These micro boosts add up to some impressive momentum – and that’s the heart of the flywheel model. Your customers are engaged and happy, and you’re becoming closer and closer partners as you strive to find new ways to solve their problems. Awesome!
Well, it’s one thing to understand this, and another to get there. That’s where this post comes in.
Unite Under A Customer Relationship Manager
A CRM is vital for any company interested in understanding its customers. But it’s also an important tool for collaboration within the company. Customer data can be shared amongst the three departments as relevant for each. This helps you provide the customer that holistic, personalized experience they’ve come to expect.
By the time Customer Service gets in the game, they already know and can base their approach off of what Marketing and Sales have already done, and the customer isn’t having a jarring experience that doesn’t reflect previous interactions.
Our choice for CRM is, hands-down, HubSpot. You can find out why here.
Get Buy-in From Leadership for your new Marketing/Sales/Customer Service Model
Adopting this model is going to require the support of the C-suite. They’re concerned about the ability of the company to survive and prosper, so talk about how the way to achieve that is by allowing their three major revenue growth drivers to operate together and play off each other.
This closer integration is after all, all about directly maximising customer acquisition and retention. With a C-suite advocate to champion the cause, you’ll be able to get the mandate and resources to put all this into action.
Talk to Each Other!
How else are you going to do it? Establish regular communication and stick to it. The last thing you want is to draw up an amazing plan, but then slip back into your old habits as the daily pressures mount up.
Resist that temptation by making a point to check in with the other departments. If that means weekly meetings, set aside the time to sit down and discuss strategy. If it means more informally dropping by your colleagues' desks for a few minutes for a quick chat? Still a good idea.
Evaluate and Collaborate Over the Entire Process
Follow a customer through the process and discuss what happened. How did Marketing excel? How did Sales follow up? Did Customer Service discover anything that the other departments could learn from?
You’re all content creators in your own ways. Marketing might produce the bulk of what’s traditionally understood as content, with blog articles, ad copy, and so on. But the customer nonetheless engages with content produced by other departments, whether it’s a well-practiced sales pitch or the text around automated customer service ticketing.
The CRM should allow you to evaluate the performance of everything, but the individual departments will be best-positioned to understand that performance and share the results. Learn from each other, and adopt the best approaches, combining them into one excellent whole.
Find a Partner Who Believes in Your Company
Just as you should believe in helping your customers succeed, you in turn should demand the best experience when you’re the client. At Flawless Inbound, we don’t just talk about this stuff: we prove it to ourselves and our clients by adopting the very approach we advocate. So, if you need a hand implementing all of this, you’ll be getting that same experience yourself that you’re looking to build for your customer with us.
Flawless Inbound is a revenue growth agency specializing in helping B2B companies achieve marketing, sales, and customer service growth and success. We’ve helped more than 60 B2B organizations across Canada and the US and are always happy to meet for a quick advisory call. Contact us to get an answer on how all this can work for you.