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It’s no secret that many B2C sales and marketing teams go together about as well as peanut butter and ketchup. They often work in silos with little meaningful communication or collaboration. While they’re both responsible for driving revenue, they often lack the cohesive, shared strategy required to achieve it. This misalignment causes serious issues that put a wrench in pipelines and stifle revenue growth.
In this blog post, we break down the most common challenges that cause disconnects between B2C sales and marketing teams. We also dive into how leading companies solve these challenges with revenue execution platforms.
In our recent State of B2C Revenue Execution Report, we discovered that poor alignment between marketing and sales at B2C companies is due to several interrelated factors. The leading cause is a lack of alignment on strategy. While both departments have a vested interest in driving more revenue, they are heavily siloed and function independently from each other. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and, as a result, they can’t collaborate effectively.
For example, let’s say a marketing team prioritises sending a high volume of leads to the contact centre. Unbeknownst to marketing, the contact centre team doesn’t have the capacity to handle all of those leads, which results in long hold times, low conversion rates, and wasted marketing spend. This problem could have been avoided if the teams aligned their objectives to focus on high-quality leads rather than prioritising quantity.
In other cases, marketers may be hyperfixated on metrics like MQLs, cost per acquisition, web visitors, and CPC, which may not have a direct impact on the sales team’s success and the organisation’s overall goal of driving revenue.
If your teams use different data from different sources, they’ll likely have different interpretations of the buying journey. For example, if your teams aren’t looking at the same data or just don’t have access to half of it, it’s easy to point fingers at one another when conversion rates dip. The classic argument is doomed to rear its ugly head: marketing says sales isn’t closing the scorching hot leads they send, and sales says the leads are ice cold.
This argument leaves teams at a standoff and is counterproductive to the goal of driving revenue. The best way to overcome it is to create a designated data hub that serves as a single source of truth for both teams. With this single source of truth, marketing and sales teams can align on a shared set of KPIs and work toward them together, rather than pointing fingers.
To solve this challenge, as well as the prior one, leading companies use revenue execution platforms. These solutions track the entire online-to-offline buyer journey, so marketing and sales teams can align around the most important metric of all — revenue. Revenue execution creates a common language between the teams, so nothing gets lost in translation.
Another issue many marketing and sales teams identified is cultural barriers hindering their collaboration. The departments are siloed and each has its own metrics, software tools, and way of managing employees. In many organisations, the two teams don’t have regular communication cadences and they begin to drift apart.
Overcoming the cultural barriers between departments, however, is easier than you may think. In our State of B2C Revenue Execution Report, 84% of people said meeting more regularly with their counterparts in marketing or sales would positively impact their ability to drive revenue. Bridging the divide can be as simple as setting a regular cadence to connect with your counterparts and approaching them with inquisitiveness and empathy. When you make a sincere effort to understand where your colleagues are coming from, you can work collaboratively to devise strategies that benefit the entire organisation.
Today’s buying journey is more complex than ever, as consumers bounce between numerous channels and devices to complete purchases. For example, a consumer may see an ad on Facebook for a sales event at a local dealership, search for the dealership on their phone, visit the dealer’s website, and then place a call to set up a test drive.
Many B2C organisations can track online conversions accurately, but when it comes to offline conversions like phone calls, the data trail goes cold. This makes it difficult for marketers to understand and optimise efforts that drive phone leads and conversions. As a result, they can’t spend their budget efficiently.
In addition, an inconsistent view of the digital journey can cause issues for sales teams. For example, when the contact centre lacks information about the digital journey that drove the call, they don’t have the information they need to quickly address the caller’s needs. The call may need to be transferred or put on hold, frustrating everyone who calls and reducing contact centre efficiency. This in turn will reduce conversion rates, directly impacting revenue growth.
Revenue execution platforms solve this problem by giving marketing and sales teams a view of the entire digital-to-call experience. This allows teams to understand how well each marketing program drives phone leads and how well sales converts those leads. In addition, revenue execution platforms give sales agents data about each caller’s digital journey before the call is connected so they can personalise greetings and quickly dive into solving issues.
Marketing and sales teams use more software than ever for everything from tracking ad performance to analysing phone calls. The problem is much of this technology isn’t integrated across marketing, sales, and contact centres, so all of the data you are collecting and analysing is underutilised and often inaccessible to those who need it.
Without a cohesive technology strategy, companies face serious alignment issues. Below are some problems that arise:
Revenue executions solve this issue, as they easily integrate with the marketing and sales tools your team uses every day. They aren’t just another tool to add to an already crowded technology stack — they seamlessly plug into the workflows you use every day.
Revenue execution platforms are AI-powered 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 conversion actions that happen over the phone.
This unified view allows marketing, sales, contact centre, and customer experience teams to connect their investments directly to revenue. As a result, they can take the right steps to drive high-quality leads, convert those leads at a higher rate, and streamline the buyer journey.
For example, with a revenue execution platform, the marketing team can track how many phone leads each campaign, channel, and keyword drives. Not only that, but they can see how well the sales team handled those leads and converted them to revenue. With this full-funnel view, they can spend more on the campaigns that work and cut the ones that don’t. They can also collaborate with the sales team to ensure more of the leads they drive convert to revenue.
With a revenue execution platform, the sales team can track the percentage of marketing leads that are high quality, rather than taking the team’s word for it. If they discover a lot of low-quality leads are coming through, they can work with marketing to increase lead quality. The sales team can also use revenue execution tools to increase close rates by enhancing routing, giving agents pre-call data about caller intent, and automating call scoring.
As a result, your sales and marketing teams can get the data and visibility they need to understand what parts of the process may be failing. You’ll gain a complete understanding of the buying journey and a common language to speak in. You can then chart a clear path to reach the common goal — driving revenue growth.
Want to learn more about how Invoca’s revenue execution platform can help you drive marketing and sales alignment? Check out these resources:
