By Whitney Satin
One of my favorite analogies about the evolving dynamic between sales and marketing involves a comparison of golf and basketball (thanks, Sales 2.0 for Dummies!). In traditional sales- or technology-driven organizations, Marketing often takes on the role of the golf caddie, setting up the shot that Sales takes with customers to land the deal … the figurative hole-in-one.
But a lot has changed in recent years, leading many B2B organizations to question this somewhat subservient relationship. It’s no question that the purchase funnel has grown in complexity, requiring that reps demonstrate an increasingly deep level of customer understanding as they engage with more and more stakeholders to close every buying decision. At the same time, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of collaborative technologies available to sales and marketing teams, making possible huge advantages to those companies able to get the right information to the right individuals at the right time.
Sales and Marketing should ideally operate more like a basketball team, passing customer engagements back and forth as they progress up the court—or in our case, across different phases of the buying cycle—until someone scores the closed deal. This approach is less about determining the proper sequence of marketing versus sales activity, and there’s no specific handoff involved. It’s much more about building a dynamic commercial team that, together, accelerates customers through the purchase funnel.
Sales and marketing are increasingly receptive to this team analogy, but results from our Commercial Integration Diagnostic show that we’ve still got a ways to go. Three-quarters of surveyed marketing and sales leaders say they DON’T currently have effective purchase funnel management, which boils down to three hot button issues:
- Sales complaining that the leads they receive from Marketing are not qualified
- Marketing complaining that Sales fails to follow up on qualified leads in a timely and effective manner
- Sales and Marketing disagreeing over the effectiveness of marketing activities in contributing to overall sales
Robust CRM systems, at one time heralded as the panacea for lead management woes, are near ubiquitous by now, but most companies have failed to truly understand how these services can build a more productive sales and marketing machine. Many companies remain hamstrung by a new set of challenges, those having to do with things like complex data quality management and end-user adoption. Layer on top of that both sales force and marketing automation technologies and suddenly you’re drowning in questions about how to integrate all these systems and, most critically, how to properly cull this information to meaningfully impact lead generation and management efforts.
MLC members, join our webinar on Tuesday, June 1st to learn more about the effect automation technologies are having on the working relationship between Sales and Marketing. The presentation will be delivered in conjunction with the Marketing Operations Cross-Company Alliance (MOCCA), a community for sharing practical experience between Marketing Operations professionals, and will feature a panelist discussion with experts in the automation terrain.
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