There’s a lot to be said for the lofty goal of having sales and marketing on the same page, some may describe it as nirvana!
CRM has brought nirvana a little closer, but it’s not quite there. However today, with the addition of a Marketing Automation platform, we could argue it has arrived.
What Is Sales Enablement?
In the context of this blog post, sales enablement covers the tools we provide the sales team to help them better engage with their prospects and customers.
For example, when marketing run an event the sales team will generally be curious about who’s registered for the event. This would generally mean phone calls to marketing asking for updates. Or, emailing names through to marketing asking they be added to the event.
There Is A Better Way
An “enabled” sales team should have access to the campaign, via the CRM, to invite their prospects. Or, at least be able to see if their contact has already been invited. If they’ve been invited, the CRM should provide details about email opens, click-throughs and registrations. Sales enablement means the sales team have control over the interactions and levels of engagement provided by your company.
Here’s One Example – Eloqua Prospect Profiler
Eloqua’s Prospect Profiler delivers contact/person specific digital footprint information directly to the sales person accessed from within the CRM. The Prospect Profiler pulls data from Eloqua to an iFrame sitting in the CRM Contact object. The Eloqua digital footprint information appears with the other contact data e.g. Historical Activities, Previous Meeting Details, the salesperson’s notes etc.
The Eloqua Prospect Profiler provides information about website visits, email engagement, twitter activity and more. The sales person clicks through to see the specific emails or landing pages that their contact saw. The sales person is now in a position to have a far more engaging, relevant and on topic conversation with their contact based on their digital footprint.
Some Technical Details
WARNING: I’m a marketer, so you know this is easy 🙂 The Eloqua Prospect Profiler can be integrated with most modern CRM systems, Oracle CRM On Demand, Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM), Salesforce and Netsuite. However Eloqua Prospect Profiler is not “integration” in the truest sense.
It’s simply a window or an iFrame sitting in your CRM which pulls in data from Eloqua. There is no exchange of data from the CRM to Eloqua. This can be achieved, but not with Profiler.
Integration for the CRM systems mentioned above is also available and we’ve done this for clients numerous times. Integration is taking specific fields from the CRM or Eloqua and delivering them to the corresponding platform.
Depending on your business, integration can really enhance the performance of both the CRM and Eloqua and improve communication between the sales and marketing teams. It can also dramatically enhance the ability of the marketing team to segment contacts based on unique data points relating to your prospects and customers. e.g. product warranty expiry details, service contract renewal dates and more.
