The price paid when sales and marketing don't talk

The tension between sales and marketing is as old as marketing itself (fun fact, ‘marketing’ first appeared in a dictionary in 1897).

This tension typically manifests as a belief that sales – or marketing, depending on where you sit ­­­­– have a far superior knowledge of the customer, and make the biggest contribution to ‘sealing the deal’.

In a modern context, the marketing team provides terabytes of data, detailed customer personas, and reams of research reports as evidence of their superior knowledge. The sales team, for their part, claim to glean their knowledge from the front line, pressing the flesh and looking into the whites of customers’ eyes.

Marketers are dismissed as ivory tower and out of touch (it is estimated up to 70% of B2B content is never used because subject topics are irrelevant to buyers).

Those pesky salespeople, on the other hand, are always forgetting to use the materials lovingly crafted by marketing:

“60% of content created in the marketing department was never used.”

(Michael Brenner, Head of Strategy at Newscred, reflects on his time at SAP).

So, is one team really more important than the other?

Of course not.

Both teams are equally important, and both need to work together if the business is to thrive.

Conversely, if the sales and marketing aren’t aligned, the results can be disastrous.

So how big is the problem?
In November 2023, the lack of alignment between sales and marketing was reportedly the number one reason for revenue loss of more than $1 trillion, according to a SuperOffice report.

Other food for thought:

• 90% of sales and marketing professionals say they are misaligned across strategy, process, content and culture.
• 60% agree that this misalignment between sales and marketing damages financial performance.
• Only 7% of salespeople say the leads they received from marketing were very high quality.
• 59% of marketers claim to know what content sales teams want them to create, but only 35% of salespeople agree.
• 68% of marketers believe sales teams don’t use the content they do produce to its maximum potential.
• One-third of sales and marketing teams don’t hold regular meetings.

Apparently, sales and marketing can’t even agree on who the customer actually is! Research done by LinkedIn found only a 23% overlap between Sales’ target audience and Marketing’s target audience in the typical B2B organisation.

Scary.

What’s being left on the table is substantial.

According to Hubspot, organisations with strong sales and marketing alignment:

• Save 30% on their customer acquisition cost
• Enjoy a 36% higher customer retention rate
• Customers have a 20% higher lifetime value
• Get a 38% higher sales win rate than non-aligned teams
• Achieve 39% higher annual revenue growth than non-aligned teams
• See 27% faster profit growth

Unsurprisingly then, 87% of sales and marketing leaders agree collaboration between their departments enables business growth, and 85% say it is the single biggest opportunity for improving business performance today.

The sales funnel has changed
The price for misalignment is high, and perhaps higher than it is ever been, possibly because the nature of purchasing journeys has changed dramatically.

In short, in a new customer-centric world, B2B customers are increasingly choosing to only engage with sales teams later in the sales funnel – being happy to carry out their own research through the interest phase and on into the consideration phase.

Source: Steve Patrizi

Prospects are researching independently online, reviewing socially and information sharing or information gathering across digital networks. They are mobile and empowered with easy access to both information, influencers, and peers.

They may be in your sales funnel, but they are not looking for any sales input, at all. Just yet.

• In fact, according to Marketo, at least 50% of the leads in any sales funnel are nowhere near being ready to buy.
• Other studies have found that 90% of the buying process is over before a salesperson talks to a lead.

Failing to understand this journey, and what customers need by way of content and contact at each stage (and therefore what role sales and marketing plays at each stage) will make it hard to offer a truly seamless customer experience, increasing the likelihood they will go elsewhere.

So how do you get that alignment? And what content is needed at each stage of this reshaped sales funnel?

You’ll find that in part 2!