It is generally observed that marketing and sales, tend to perceive the available data in extremely contrasted ways. Sales usually receives and researches information pertaining to ordering history, minutes and results of the last meeting and the credit status of an organization.
Marketing tracks information pertaining to promotions and outreach, sales reports, pricing variations, market trends, competitor??™s activities etc.
Although, the data tracked by marketing is beneficial for sales and vice versa, both tend to have different views. This results in both the sales and the marketing fields having a vague picture about today??™s consumer, his needs and his demands. The industry as a whole can suffer owing to differences in opinions between the both.
It won??™t be able to successfully sell the right customer, the right product at the right time. A strong mediator is required to help both the departments work together for the common interests.
Considered a powerful tool that can help sales and marketing work together harmoniously, closed loop marketing is both a process and a tool. Marketing plays a huge role in the first part of the process of closed loop marketing, while sales plays a pivotal and crucial role in the latter part of its process.
Through the closed loop marketing system, data can be exchanged between the marketing and sales departments in a hassle-free manner. The continuum of suspect-to-sale can be used to track customers.
Marketing data like campaigns, demographic information about the company on the website, programs, keywords, updates, offers, landing pages etc. used in company websites can be used to enable closed loop marketing.
Sales data like the number of customers, the number of successful deals, the different sales processes and the time elapsed between them, value of closed deals, total revenue generated etc. can help enable closed loop marketing.
The advantage of this kind of marketing is that it saves figures like ???10 million products sold??? or ???over a billion users tend??? to create a confidence in the prospective clients and also helps in boosting the reputation of the product substantially.
Accurate information about the current customers and the potential customers can help in targeting the right kind of customers for a particular product. Through this longer sales cycles can be maintained. All this ensures the success of closed loop marketing.
With the right reports and closed loop marketing processes the sales and marketing departments of an industrial unit can work towards it betterments.
Indeed, the hype is justified!