Sales and Marketing Leaders seek better COLLABORATION

Most sales and marketing organizations haven’t been able to pivot fast enough to the new digital buyer. This means they risk falling short of their revenue mandate. More than 70% of marketers don’t feel very confident in their current sales and marketing model to sell effectively in the digitalized customer journey, according to a new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report, produced in partnership with KPMG LLP.

The report, “Sales & Marketing: Driving Revenue Through Collaboration,” examines the marketing and sales relationship and how it should evolve. The report found that the ability to share customers insights, gathered by data science as well as AI and machine learning, with the sales team to inform the pipeline is one of the defining traits of the new sales-marketing relationship.

Key findings include:

• 70% of marketers don’t feel very confident in their current sales and marketing model to sell effectively in the digitalized customer journey
• 60% say marketing and sales don’t co-own customer strategy and data
• 61% of marketers say fragmented technology across marketing, sales and service restrains better sales-marketing alignment

“Sales and marketing will have to redefine their relationship to enable new customer-centric purchasing paths. This requires an entirely new way to collaborate across customer strategy and data, initiatives, technology, activities and metrics,” said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council.

CMOs should adopt four sales-marketing alignment initiatives to better support the digitalized customer journey and self-reliant buyer:

• Collaborate to achieve business objectives (e.g., revenue, customer acquisition, market share)
• Collaborate on marketing and sales campaigns that drive lead gen
• Define shared KPIs for marketing and sales
• Align on customer personas

“To sell effectively to the new self-reliant digital buyer and enable the purchasing paths customers seek, marketing and sales teams need to have the same goals, speak the same language, and hold each other accountable,” said Jason Galloway, Customer Advisory Lead and Marketing Consulting Practice Lead, KPMG LLP. “The keys to building a strong sales-marketing relationship include co-ownership of customer strategy and data, the agility and ability to hand off real-time data insights and employing the right technologies to share metrics and ensure consistent communication. The next twelve months are critical for marketing and sales teams to integrate data and optimize touchpoints across the customer journey.”