Why collaboration is the key to true business intelligence

Mat Singer, head of sales enablement at Upland Software, discusses the role collaboration plays in gaining true business intelligence

Effective collaboration between departments can be the differentiator between success and failure, and is key to true business intelligence. The crucial role of collaboration has been proven again and again; the best companies have seamless and transparent working practices across departments, while the worst are siloed, uncommunicative and unaware of what peers in other departments are doing.

Sadly, until now, many organisations have suffered from a lack of connection between those departments that directly or indirectly touch with the customer.

Seamless data collaboration between departments that covers the entire customer journey, such as sales, marketing, renewals, and customer success, plays a crucial role as it offers the organisation a reliable picture of how its customer base behaves. In this way, businesses can find out what outcomes customers and prospects are looking for, what adoption rates look like for each of its products, and how unsatisfied customers might be helped. Then, the organisation can continuously improve customer experience and ensure customers are happy with their product and getting their ROI.

What is needed is a firm alliance between all teams that interact with the customer. Sales and marketing are the two most important, yet they have historically had challenges in staying aligned around the needs of their customers. Research found that 68% of marketers believe their sales colleagues do not use their content correctly. Meanwhile, 74% of sales reps think marketers don’t even know what content is useful to them. Now it’s time to bridge that gap — the future of business is to align these two functions in order to generate more revenue and support and engage the customer at every point of the journey.

Decision-makers should refocus the organisational strategy into securing this constant information flow as a critical part of the business strategy. The intelligence that stems from collaboration and information sharing across the entire revenue team helps the company better understand the customer, providing the insights they need across the entire buyer journey. The total of this information enables the company to make better decisions, form a sustainable strategy for each account, and apply a revenue optimisation approach.

Using shared insights achieved through collaboration to continuously improve the customer journey is not always a simple process.