You’re using multiple silo systems for your business and it’s affecting your ability to report on your marketing data effectively. Sound familiar? We come across it a lot. Plenty of companies use silo systems to manage different facets of their marketing. In the process of sharing this information across teams, their data is suffering.

If you’re in a similar situation, here is what you can do about it.

Bring all your marketing under one roof

Why not manage your marketing in one place. Your lead generation, email marketing and social media should all feed into one area. This way both sales and marketing (and any other departments for that matter) can see what is going on. They can actually see how marketing activities are affecting prospects behaviour.

But how do you go about bringing all your marketing under one roof? How do you make your silo systems TALK to each other?

First, you need silo systems that will integrate

You could have the best IP lookup tool around, but if it doesn’t feed into your email marketing and CRM it can cause problems with your sales team and mixed messaging for prospects. Ideally, you need systems that know how to talk to each other. At the least, you need systems that will all integrate with your CRM.  

Your CRM is where your sales and marketing teams spend most of their time. That makes it the logical place for all your silo systems to feed into intuitively. Without it, you don’t have one place to manage all your marketing data.

Second, you need a system that aligns sales and marketing goals

It’s something we are seeing more and more of. The need for sales and marketing to work together more closely to improve their conversion rates. In the past, marketing and sales have most often fallen out on what qualifies a lead. It was why we turned to lead scoring

A numerical scoring system helps sales and marketing identify which leads are genuine opportunities. Combine the lead scoring within your marketing activities with sales top target profiling in CRM and you will have a pool of marketing data prospects that are ideal for your business.

Finally, you need to keep communication channels open

If you have multiple silo systems, it is likely you have multiple service providers. With different service providers focusing on different aspects, it can sometimes be difficult to align those goals in the first place. Information gets lost in translation, so to speak. Then your marketing data is either too old to work with, the wrong type of data or sales don’t understand what to do with it.

That is why it is so important that all the information your service providers use marry up. Of course, this is easier if you have one service provider that can host all your silo systems in one place.

Let’s face it. The sales pipeline is never a smooth process. But having one service provider and silo systems that can all sit under one roof will make it easier for you. It will make your marketing data as effective as possible for sales. After all, we’re all working towards the goal of winning new business. Managing your marketing in one place allows you to focus on that.