Why should marketing and sales work together? (part 2)
In our last article “Digitalization of the marketing and sales landscape” we spoke about factors that cause misalignment between marketing and sales. Several causes of this misalignment are different ways of working, culture, objectives, and KPI’s and leads that are defined quite differently. Other factors that can cause misalignment between marketing and sales are poor communication and poor coordination by management. All of these elements inhibit marketing and sales to effectively work together. This can lead to the observation that marketing and sales act as two completely different organizations under one roof. The difference in focus and perspective causes a misalignment or a wall so to speak between marketing and sales.
However, the common interest of marketing and sales should be the same: “how to increase sales, revenue and profitability for the organization?”.
The question is, how can we attain this goal and breakdown the wall? How can we ensure quality metrics to proof both marketing and sales accountability?
How can marketing help sales to become more customer centric and thereby add value to the sales process? And how can we successfully transfer quality leads from marketing to sales?
Every wrongly identified lead, generated by marketing, can cost sales up to 2 days of work. According to Forrester research (1): “In 42% of companies, marketing creates sales leads and sales tools and throw them over the wall to sales, without qualifying them”. According to research by Sirius Decisions (2009) 70% of disqualified leads, but buy anyway within 24 months from your company of a your competitor. Potential sales are leaking from the sales funnel!
Due to the increasingly better buying position of the customer, marketing is in a unique position to provide the sales team with critical information on prospect behavior in order to help them be more effective (5). According to Aberdeen research (2009) insight for the B2B sales department is key. Organizations that invest in sales tools that provide more prospects insight see good results:
- 71% year over year improvement in sales cycle time.
- 51% year over year improvement in lead conversion rates.
- 54% year over year improvement in the percent of sales reps achieving quota
Enable alignment between marketing and sales
Baseline is that marketing generates and nurtures leads and passes these to the sales department, that prioritize leads and thereby increase revenue, profitability and/or market share. This sounds easy, but we have seen that it is not. It is a costly and time consuming process to find, nurture, score and align leads with sales. Furthermore changing buyer behaviors require B2B marketers to communicate with prospects and customers in new ways, by delivering content that is personalized to their needs, role, level of interest, and stage of problem-solving. This has made marketing automation a mission-critical system for B2B marketers (2).
However technology can automate manual, repetitive, mundane tasks and thereby enable the operational efficiency of the marketing department. Technology can ENABLE marketing to better work together with sales. Research shows that companies which achieve the best financial and marketing results (revenue and ROI) are four times more likely than peers to automate customer engagement with a marketing automation solution (3).
This sounds convincing, so a lot of companies must probably use some form of marketing automation right? No, on the contrary! Forrester (4) states: “More than half of the firms surveyed have not started down the automation path … Twenty-three percent say that they barely scratch the surface of what the technology can do.”. But what is marketing automation exactly? And how can we use it to align marketing and sales activities?
According to Wikipedia, Marketing Automation is defined as follows: “The use of marketing automation platform streamlines sales and marketing organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. Marketing automation is technology; it’s technology that helps to automate marketing management and customer engagement (3).
When we focus a bit more on the B2B aspect of marketing automation, we can use the following Forrester definition (6):
“Tooling and process that help generate new business opportunities, improve potential buyers’ propensity to purchase, manage customer loyalty, and increase alignment between marketing activity and revenue”
The focus of Marketing Automation is on lead generation with targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s product and/or service and nurture leads from first interest through to sales. If you add “Intelligent” before Marketing Automation, you will get a new capability which makes it possible to send the right message and the right time to the right customer. This is performed by automatically analyzing the digital behavior of the customer and adjusting it for your communication channels and content.
However, we cannot state enough that implementing a tool or certain technology will end all of the marketing and sales misalignment, there is much more to explore! Also we do not believe that implementing a marketing automation solution will end all misalignment between marketing and sales and will let them work in perfect harmony. Many marketing leaders head down the automation path without fully realizing what they are getting into (6).
This is because only implementing the tool (like Marketo, Eloqua or Silverpop) does not automatically lead to other behavior of and between marketing and sales, but it can be seen as a great ENABLER for better cooperation. It should be used to improve this working together and breakdown the wall which currently stands between them.
It is crucial to set-up the organization, processes and people when implementing a new tool. This because effective marketing automation require the full participation and support of both sales and marketing (5). The entire implementation begins by creating a common ground and use of common definitions. Marketers need to communicate with potential buyers at every stage of their problem-solving cycle, providing them with information that is targeted to their needs, role, intent and interest level. Thereby they need to communicate and coordinate their activities with sales as well.
To manage both this depth of internal coordination and engagement with the buyer at scale, this requires marketing automation (5).
Next week the last part of our view on the alignment of marketing & sales in the digital landscape: How to use Marketing Automation to break down the wall(s) between marketing and sales?
Sources
(1) Forrester (2011) The state of B2B Generation – disjointed
(2) Forrester (2011) – B2B Marketers Must Better Prepare For Marketing Automation
(3) eCommerceTimes / Aberdeen Group (2009) – What Is Marketing Automation and Why Should You Care?
(4) Forrester (2011) – The state of B2B Generation – disjointed
(5) Forrester (2010) – Marketing Automation A Catalyst For Alignment With Sales
(6) Forrester (2011) – B2B Marketers Must Better Prepare For Marketing Automation
Laaste 5 artikelen van Harry Mesker
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