The necessity for close collaboration between the sales and marketing departments is crucial. This allows the business funnel to perform consistently and make way for progress.

The marketing team generates leads through multiple activities and market-research activity is among the most critical. These activities also generate ads that are designed to speak to the target customer’s business needs. 

Marketing also contributes by supplying marketing material to be used by the sales team. The sales team follows up on the leads generation and with the goal to make conversions and close sales to generate revenue. 

Today, demarcations of how and what marketing and sales are expected to deliver are diminishing. Marketing teams focus on developing and nurturing relationships leads before handing them off to Sales. This delay makes it easier for a sales team to establish a quality connection with the customer. Cold leads are more difficult to secure. An efficient sales team will close the deals effectively to generate the revenue that makes the marketing efforts worth the while. 

The right balance and the ability to marry the different facets of Sales and Marketing functions nurture an effective partnership that promotes enhanced growth.

“70% of customers say connected processes — such as seamless handoffs or contextualized engagement based on earlier interactions — are very important to winning their business.”- Salesforce.

In line with the above, marketers today are expected to track and capture every aspect of sales, service, and commerce to ensure timely and relevant content is delivered to Sales teams in interactions with the target audience. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one such dynamic platform that offers numerous marketing effectiveness enhancement possibilities.

What is Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform for marketers that allows them to generate and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with a target audience. It’s a dynamic marketing platform packed with multiple tools designed to efficiently manage a brand’s interaction with its current (and potential) customers across various channels. 

The technology powering this tool allows users to create multichannel experiences, contact customers on the right channel at the right time, and through various mediums (email, SMS, push notifications, social ads, etc.). This helps increase customer acquisition and sales. Marketing Cloud paves a way to efficiently plan, monitor, analyze, and make strategic marketing decisions in real-time.

What is Sales Cloud?

Salesforce Sales Cloud on the other hand increases sales by extending the scope and enhancing the effectiveness of the sales team in an organization. What stands out about this platform is that it provides both the account information of the customer along with the information gathered from the social platforms about the product and customer. This increases the chances of converting and closing sales.

Why Integrate Sales and Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the “Marketing Automation” arm of the Salesforce technology, while Sales Cloud falls under the CRM category. Let us say a customer joins a loyalty program with your business. The marketing cloud system might then be triggered to send a welcome message. This same event could trigger data updates in the customer contact record in the Sales Cloud as well. 

In an integrated environment with both these systems, a unified experience is established to prevent customers from being contacted multiple times across various groups. 

Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration also extend to the advanced email marketing capabilities of the Sales team by combining contact and lead data from your Sales Cloud org with Marketing Cloud campaigns. This combination provides a single view of how your customers interact with your business.

Benefits of Integrating Marketing Cloud with Sales Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration with Sales Cloud spurs several benefits. These are discussed in detail below.

1. A Foundational Benefit – Unifying Marketing And Sales Efforts

It is possible to obtain deeper insights from the offers and messaging that resonates with customers. This information can be used regularly to develop marketing and sales strategies. 

Say there is collateral built by the marketing team directly in Marketing Cloud. The sales team would send this marketing-approved content directly from Sales Cloud to customers through integration. This means that the sales team has access to the library of branded, approved content and can use this information to target and convert the most appropriate prospects at the right stage in the sales funnel. 

Similarly, it is also possible to automate coordinated hand offs between sales and marketing. An example of this is when Sales moves a prospect down a funnel with the distribution of automated email/ text messages through various stages.

Those prospects that are not converted are moved into nurture campaigns in the marketing cloud for automated follow-up. This frees up bandwidth for sales teams to focus on other prospects. 

Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud integration also allows for more cross-selling opportunities when marketing to existing customers. Once a new customer completes on-boarding, the marketing team can slowly and seamlessly initiate marketing new services and products to generate new business from the existing customers. 

It is also possible to track customers when they visit your website, capturing their interests, or gain user experience feedback. This also enables the sales team to reach out to them with personalized messages as they cross-sell, upsell, or stop churn in its tracks. 

Even if generating additional business does align with a business’s objectives it can still drive engagement through other forms of communication – newsletters, events, other announcements, etc.

2. Obtain A 360 View Of Customers

When Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud connect through integration, both teams have access to a wealth of valuable customer information along with tools to help make those insights actionable.

Integration helps by monitoring how a prospect moves through both the marketing and sales processes by shedding light on what motivates buyers to convert. Marketing teams get invaluable insight into what customers want, the channels they actively use, and their brand interaction. 

The sales team can then leverage these insights to deliver highly-personalized sales pitches to these prospects with a higher rate of conversion. Every touchpoint with a customer yields an opportunity to gather more insights. 

With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration, the sales team obtains detailed insights into how marketing emails are received by a prospect and whether they’ve opened them or clicked on any links within them. This helps prioritize prospects efficiently and indicates what messaging and offers resonate well. 

3. Personalized Messages and Audience Segmentation

Integration within a working environment where sales and marketing efforts are in tandem makes it possible to identify and segregate customers and prospects into defined funnels. This allows you to further personalize messaging for each segment and be more specific when targeting prospects which should lead to an increase in customer loyalty and sales.

Conclusion

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration with Sales Cloud isn’t as simple as toggling a few settings. It involves checking off the right boxes for both systems, assessing and understanding certain considerations in both systems. 

It involves careful planning, continuous development, and especially the services of the right Salesforce integration partner to reap the most benefits from the process. 

About AppShark

AppShark is both a Salesforce Gold Consulting Partner and a Product Development Partner based in Dallas, Texas. Our implementation process which includes customization, set up, and configuration has been perfected by many years served in the Salesforce industry. We also provide software integration services including strategy, development, and management to enable a continual flow of information from the cloud, premise to premise, or from cloud to premise platforms. To know more about our Salesforce expertise and experience contact us.