Sales and marketing alignment continues to be a challenge for many B2B organizations.
When aligned, sales and marketing work together in a coordinated effort to achieve a shared revenue goal, and the benefits are pretty compelling:
- McKinsey research shows that companies with advanced marketing and sales capabilities tend to grow their revenue two to three times more than the average company within their sector.
- MarketingProfs found that organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions experience 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates.
- According to SiriusDecisions, B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieved 24% faster growth and 27% faster profit growth over a three-year period.
If you think about it, marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin. Both are jointly responsible for building a healthy pipeline and converting it into closed business, so they can no longer afford to work in silos. Gone are the days of marketing throwing leads over the fence for sales to work on.
Marketers need more insights into what's going on during the sales cycle so they can better understand what the sales team truly needs from marketing and where they need to focus. For sellers, it's equally important to see how marketing is contributing to pipeline build and how they can leverage that support to win deals at scale.
Here are two simple ways for helping sales and marketing get on the same page and start managing the pipeline together:
1. Share Marketing Engagement Data with Sales
Marketing is running nurture campaigns and air coverage programs to drive engagement throughout the sales cycle. Give sales visibility into all of this marketing engagement on active deals.
If sellers can see when prospects open marketing emails, download content, or register for webinars, they can get one more signal to help them better evaluate the true state of deals and more effectively navigate the sales cycle. Managers can also get a broader context around how deals are progressing so they can identify risk as they inspect the pipeline.
2. Share Sales Activity Data with Marketing
While sales reps engage in a ton of selling activity on a daily basis, only a small fraction of what they do actually gets recorded in CRM. On average, 50-70% of the people with whom sales reps meet don't even exist as contacts in CRM.
Without this critical data, marketing can't effectively nurture prospects, optimize ABM campaigns, attribute touchpoints to won deals, or measure the ROI for their programs.
Fortunately, now there's a way to capture sales activity and contact data automatically so reps don't have to spend time entering it to CRM. That means you can easily let marketing know who sales is engaging with so they can better track campaign influence. Armed with the right data, marketing can stop what doesn't work and optimize what does.
The distinct lines that once separated sales from marketing are blurring. Marketers and sellers are jointly responsible for the overall pipeline.