CRM's impact on the customer relationship

Sales and marketing have evolved to become more collaborative, and CRM is partly the reason behind it.

Gavin Watson, marketing leader at Monday.com describes to Digital Nation Australia how CRM software has impacted the interdepartmental relationship between sales and marketing.

He said, “The customer has become the forefront of everything that organisations do. For us here at Monday.com, the customer is the most important thing. Understanding the customer's needs and then understanding how to keep customers happy through the lifecycle, and then how to keep them happy as an ongoing customer.”

Breaking those stages down, Watson said understanding the customer and being able to market and promote your product or service to the customer is important.

“A lot of on ground feedback comes by the sales channel, sales teams filtering that information back to the marketing teams to construct or put together the content collateral, the messaging that's going to be put out to those prospects has to be done and does happen,” he explained.

“Looking at the content that gets produced, the activities are put together, an approval channel from marketing is via the sales team. Getting feedback from the sales teams as to the relevance of the content or collateral that's being put together.”

As you go through the lifecycle of working with the clients, Watson said the company focuses on getting customer testimonials and customer feedback.

“A lot of that is done between the sales and marketing team, the link between the two is becoming closer because customers are at the centre point of what both teams are focused on. With that, a CRM makes a lot of sense to understand in bigger organisations, but even in midsize organisations as well, who exactly is dealing with which customers are which segments,” Watson said.

“The CRM then becomes really important to be able to manage that sort of information,” he added.

As the CRM gives sales and marketing, the ability to be across everything about the customer, this naturally brings them closer together.