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Closing the Gap Report: The Sales & Marketing Alignment Imperative
CMO COUNCIL, Dec 2008, Pages: 50
As more executives are being held accountable for process and sales optimization, bridging the gap and aligning sales with marketing is a critical imperative versus a luxury of company culture. The study, which reached out to a wide cross-section of marketing, sales and channel management professions worldwide, is part of a new initiative to help companies drive business performance, improve lead quality and conversion rates, and acquire higher value, more profitable customers through better analytics. The report aggregates a worldwide audience of sales professionals seeking to further their effectiveness through knowledge exchange, peer-to-peer networking and best practice studies
Global businesses continue to suffer from a seemingly unbridgeable divide between their marketing and sales teams a gap which undermines two of the most important competencies necessary to generate demand, capture revenue and gain competitive advantage. The traditional relationship between sales, marketing and channel groups tends to be more antagonistic than synergistic. Even in those enterprises where sales and marketing staff are merged into one department with one management structure, the adversarial dynamic is frequently both institutional and cultural. While management perceives cooperation and peaceful co-existence on the organizational chart, there is typically still mistrust, misunderstanding of function, and a lack of alignment and singularity of purpose.
The performance potential of many organizations is still inhibited by lack of integration among channel, sales, marketing and customer service groups. Strategies and programs are developed in isolation, customer and prospect information is often siloed and not shared. Leads frequently languish, or are not properly qualified or acted upon as they lay buried or dormant in underutilized CRM systems. Less than seven percent of more than 500 resellers (across six industry sectors) surveyed said vendors were their most valuable source of leads, and only 19 percent report vendor leads were highly actionable. Nearly 40 percent of resellers report some form of conflict or competition with vendor sales organizations, and a whopping 70 percent state that vendor marketing campaigns are ineffective or somewhat ineffective in driving their business.
- Salespeople are spending approximately 40 percent of their time preparing customer-facing deliverables while leveraging less than 50 percent of the materials created by marketing.
- Only 10–20 percent of salespeople are creating deliverables that are both compelling to their customers and consistent with their corporate messaging.
- Almost 85 percent of a company’s brand image is determined by the direct interaction between the sales force and its customers. Eighty five percent of the purchase decision is impacted by the direct interaction between the sales force and the customers.
CLOSING THE GAP: The Sales & Marketing Alignment Imperatiative shows that many companies worldwide still fall short of realizing aligned sales goals and marketing activities. And while many companies recognize the benefits of better partnering across these key demand-generating functions, they are being stymied by lack of processes and systems, siloed operations, insufficient management mandate, and ineffective reporting and organizational structures.
Marketing must power both the go-to-market process and every step of the lead generation, qualification, closing and account reactivation cycle in order to truly be an effective partner with sales to drive growth and performance. This tightly coupled sales and marketing function should drive business performance, improve lead quality and conversion rates, and acquire higher value, more profitable customers through better analytics not struggle for common ground and battling for power.
This report will also highlight the technology and data shortcomings and solutions that will help bind sales and marketing. Respondents point out that neither sales or marketing is effectively leveraging customer data and insight to form deeper, more connected relationships with the customer. While solutions like CRM systems tend to be mandated and adopted across the sales organization, they tend to be more selectively embraced by marketing teams in business units and departments. This leaves marketing in the dark, disconnected from sales, and even worse, blind to the interactions of the customer.
It is quite simple: partner or perish. Closing the Gap looks to start a conversation for worldwide sales and marketing professionals seeking to further their effectiveness through knowledge exchange, peer-to-peer networking and best practice studies. At this important inflection point, neither group can afford to indulge these random acts of marketing or maverick sales cycles.
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