More successful collaboration between Marketing and Sales with help of SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud

Marco Meijs, 28 February 2018

Do you feel that the conversion of leads to actual sales is not high enough and thus making your campaigns ineffective? If so, then maybe you need to have a closer look at the “Handshake” between marketing and sales.

With the digital transformation the borders between marketing and sales are fading. In many organisations however there is still a clear separation between the two departments. To be able to stay relevant in this changing environment marketing and sales need to collaborate more and more. An important aspect in this is the moment of handover of leads from one to the other, the so called “Handshake”.

The Handshake is the point in time when marketing hands over a (qualified) lead to sales. This Handshake needs to be based on a mutual alignment made between the marketing and sales departments, defining when a lead is qualified enough for sales to take over.

So before you start with lead generation and nurturing, marketing and sales need to have a discussion that defines the requirements for a lead to be handed over. In this blog we will look how SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud can help with implementing this.

Once there is an agreement between marketing and sales you need to implement it in your day-to-day operations. By using Hybris Marketing Cloud and integrate it with your sales tooling you will be able, but are not limited, to:

Easily gather data from different sources helping marketing to come to the required qualification level;
Automatically transfer leads and campaign activities to your sales department improving the ease of use and raising collaboration;
Keep track of the progress of the lead throughout the funnel from marketing and sales.

Now let’s take a closer look at the above points

Easily gather data from different sources helping marketing to come to the required qualification level

In many cases a lead needs to be nurtured by marketing before it is qualified enough to be handed over to sales. Because we have defined when a lead is qualified to be handed over to sales it is clear what data is required. SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud enables you to qualify each lead based on your own preferences. With Lead stages (for instance: Active, Inquiry, Interested, Qualified) and lead scoring you can easily classify the lead.

By using customer and consumer profiling you can enrich the data via internal and external data sources raising the qualification level needed for the lead to be handed over to sales.

By defining and scoring all interactions you can easily track the progress of the leads via the:

Profile;
Customer journey insight and;
Sentiment engagement dashboards.

Automatically transfer leads and campaign activities to your sales department improving the ease of use and raising collaboration

With Hybris Marketing Cloud you can integrate out-of-the-box with your SAP Cloud for Customer or SAP CRM backend system. This allows you to automatically transfer the lead from your marketing to sales based on the earlier defined qualification levels.
Once the level has been reached the lead is automatically transferred to sales. All information gathered by sales will also be available in the SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud environment.

The integration also allows you to include the sales department earlier on in your campaigns by assigning activities directly to your sales force. This further enhances the collaboration within the organisation and will result in a smoother handshake. These activities can be divided into:

Appointments;
Phone Calls;
Tasks.

The information, also for leads, that is gathered by the sales force can be used in the SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud system to be further used in your campaign activities. The features of the integration, at time of writing, are:

Keep track of the progress of the lead throughout the funnel from marketing and sales

Because of the integration capabilities of SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud you can track the progress of the leads, integrating with the sales data, via standard reporting suite and the additional flexible query environment:

1 To track progress the so called Integrated Lead Management Dashboard will give you a wide variety of dashboards, for instance:

Overview
Campaign Details
Lead and Opportunity details
Item of Interest
Products
Marketing Lead Funnel

2 And the Analytics Queries gives you even greater flexibility and options to define your own selections.

Conclusion

SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud can improve your lead conversion and help with the collaboration between sales and marketing. But to be successful in this process your marketing and sales department need to sit together and come to an agreement on what data is required, and what can be expected from each other, to succesfully transfer leads to sales.