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Throughout our lives, we’ve all seen countless movies that extoll the values of teamwork, like Remember the Titans, The Mighty Ducks, Coach Carter, Spacejam, and my personal favorite, Talladega Nights (shake and bake, baby!)
Despite absorbing these lessons from a young age, we don’t always apply them to our day-to-day lives. For example, the business world is full of marketing and sales teams that don’t collaborate effectively. They operate in silos and meet with one another infrequently. This leads to miscommunications, hiccups in their processes, and a general lack of cohesion that can stifle business growth.
In this post, we’ll break down the correlation between B2C marketing and sales alignment and revenue growth. We’ll also show how you can use a revenue execution platform to improve collaboration and shake and bake your way ahead of the competition. Because in the words of the immortal Ricky Bobby: “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
In our new State of B2C Revenue Execution Report, we found that while marketing and sales jointly own revenue at B2C companies, their teams are woefully disconnected. Though they understand this is a problem, don’t know how to go about correcting it.
In perhaps the most jaw-dropping finding of the study, over 90% of marketing, sales, and contact centre leaders said that alignment across their departments is important for driving revenue growth. However, only a measly 1 in 10 say their teams are strongly aligned.
This misalignment can hinder long-term revenue growth. For example, marketing could be wholly unaware that its campaigns are sending low-quality phone leads to the sales team. Without the right visibility into lead quality and conversion rates, they could be flushing their advertising budget down the drain without even realising it. Sales, meanwhile, could be unaware of a new promotion that the marketing team is running. Without the right scripts to talk about the promotion, they could fumble the phone leads the marketing teams sends over.
Organisations with tightly aligned marketing and sales departments, on the other hand, are optimistic about their future prospects. A whopping 82% of companies with strongly aligned marketing and sales teams expect revenue to increase significantly in 2024. By contrast, only 33% of teams with poorly aligned teams expect the same level of growth.
The correlation between marketing and sales alignment and revenue growth is clear. Driving collaboration, of course, is easier said than done — that’s why we’ve provided some tips in the next section to help you get started.
Want to read more original research about marketing and sales team misalignment? Download our full State of B2C Revenue Execution Report.
Now that we’ve established the importance of marketing and sales alignment, let’s get into some tips to help you improve collaboration between the teams. Below are the four biggest areas for improvement that our recent study uncovered.
One of the key reasons that marketing and sales teams fail to collaborate effectively is that they don’t trust each other. According to our State of B2C Revenue Execution Report, only 19% of marketing teams have very high trust in contact centre teams to convert leads into sales. This lack of trust extends both ways, as only 22% of contact centre leaders have very high trust in the marketing team to deliver high-quality phone leads.
Nothing erodes trust between marketing and sales teams faster than fingerpointing. When revenue is lower than expected, the teams often devolve into a classic argument: the marketing says sales is fumbling its hot leads, while sales claims those leads were ice cold. This kind of environment causes friction between the teams and makes it difficult for them to come together and dig into the real heart of the issue. If both teams take a defensive position and aren’t willing to do any self-reflection, the problem will only continue.
It may sound like a simple solution, but when your marketing and sales teams communicate on a regular basis, it can pay big dividends for your organisation. Our study found that 84% of sales and marketing professionals think meeting more regularly with their counterparts would positively impact their ability to drive more revenue.
Simply arranging regular meetings with your counterparts can allow your teams to build stronger relationships and improve the flow of information. Or, you could also invite them to social events, such as dinners or drinks (putting it all on your department’s credit card is sure to build some immediate goodwill!)
In our recent webinar, Melissa Reilly, Assistant Vice President of Digital Marketing at U.S. Bank/Elavon, shared how she went about building trust with her sales team: “Before I joined the company, the sales and marketing teams weren’t talking to each other. I took the initiative and invited the sales team to dinner so we could build a connection. Making the first move and setting up those conversations really helped our collaboration down the road.”
Watch the clip below to learn more:
A common issue that marketing and sales teams face is that their success is defined by completely different metrics. Marketing teams may be focusing on cost per click, cost per lead, website traffic, engagement rate, and lead volume, while sales teams are looking at deal progression and close rates.
An effective way to improve marketing and sales collaboration is to align around a shared objective: revenue growth. This is the metric that matters most to your business, and what you should be ultimately striving for. However, many marketing teams face attribution roadblocks that leave them unable to track their full impact on revenue — especially when it comes to the phone leads their campaigns drive. Our study found that a whopping 50% of marketing leaders find it hard to tie marketing spend to revenue.
To solve this issue and get granular phone call attribution, leading companies use revenue execution platforms like Invoca (more on this later).
There have never been more software tools for marketing and sales teams. Though these new tools open new doors and possibilities, they also can create confusion and alignment issues between the teams. In fact, the respondents in our study cited a lack of integrated technologies as one of the top challenges hindering sales and marketing alignment.
When your sales and marketing teams don’t have a data hub that acts as a single source of truth, it can muddy the waters. The teams may have conflicting numbers and no clear way to identify which are right, throwing a major wrench in strategy discussions. These issues won’t go away on their own — they often require costly and time-consuming data scrubbing to correct.
To correct this issue, leading companies use revenue execution platforms like Invoca. These tools connect the entire online-to-offline buying journey and create a shared language of data that the teams can align on to guide their strategies.
Revenue execution platforms are software solutions that connect the entire customer buying journey. They work by bridging the data gap between the marketing team that engages customers and the sales teams that close the deals. This creates a cohesive view of the revenue journey for interactions that take place online and over the phone.
This unified view allows marketing, sales, digital, and customer experience teams to connect their investments directly to revenue. As a result, they can:
Want to learn more about how revenue execution platforms can align your marketing and sales teams? Check out these resources:
