The integration of sales, marketing and client success (or customer service) is a central concept when optimizing your business for smart, sustainable revenue.
Let’s start with marketing. For your marketing to be successful, you need to have a clearly and narrowly defined target audience. This usually includes a variety of demographic markers and could include industry, verticals, markets, segments, and many others. The point here is for them to be clear and marketing to spend their efforts only on accounts that fit this profile to generate marketing-qualified leads.
Once MQLs are generated, it’s time for the sales process to begin. Sales’ job in regards to integration is about effectively qualifying prospects and saying no to those who aren’t the right fit. This can be things such as specific prospect needs, how they want to buy, what their perceived problems are, how they expect services to be delivered, etc. Whatever your sales qualification process looks like, make it clear and incentivize your sales team to exercise it thoroughly.
Finally, we have customer or client success. This is where the most cross-organizational touch points can exist and is essential to effective client acquisition, retention and growth. In addition to serving customers, client success (CS) needs to be focused on listening. What are the other needs big and small that you’re client base is experiencing? Service is, of course, essential to client retention, but it’s also essential to client growth. CS teams are closest to the relationship and understand the specific needs and opportunities for cross-selling existing products as well as generating needs for new products and services.
The more these 3 teams integrate, the better.
