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Your sales department reclaims the leads coming out of marketing are not good enough. And marketing is also complaining that sales don’t follow up on leads. Sound familiar?

If so, it comes the time to check your current CRM process.

  • What criteria are you applying to assess the quality of leads in your CRM system?
  • Are they qualified based on the duplicate-free data?
  • Are your leads providing a single and value-added view of the customer? 
When we’re talking about leads, the marketing department bears the trouble of proof, including delivering a good return on marketing investment (ROMI). Your marketing efforts should be based on clean and integrated data, via a strong master data management (MDM) system to convert leads into opportunities for your sales force. If this is not happening, then your marketing team is not successful enough.

Here are some common reasons why CRM implementations are not successful:

  1. Unclear business goals and strategies. These must be defined mostly by marketing and sales (and a technical approach discussed with IT).
  2. No governance. Each time new data is loading into Salesforce or any other CRM platform, you risk creating duplicates and may not have a process to ensure the steady quality of both old and new data.
  3. Labour intensive. Marketing hours wasted on preserving the CRM data quality and integrity.
  4. Poor reports or dashboards. Lead follow-up and nurturing reports are missing information or have the wrong information.
  5. People have just stopped using your CRM system. They may have lost confidence in the system due to inaccurate account and lead information.
Align with sales to fix problems. Marketers have more power today than ever before, but they may not know how to harness it. Chief marketing officers should ensure alignment between marketing and sales when it comes to CRM data. Meeting regularly to identify business objectives, appointing a data steward, and agreeing on who owns what data are all ways to streamline the CRM process between marketing and sales. With the two teams working toward a common goal—increasing sales via the development of a CRM system with reliable data—the only way to go is up.

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