Canadian B-to-B Sales and Marketing Integration Survey
The words “sales” and “marketing” are generally spoken of in the same breath, as their goals should be nearly identical: To get new customers, and to retain and grow current ones. Unfortunately, the reality of the relationship between the two functions in most organizations ranges from strained to working at cross purposes. In an effort to drive better insights into the relationship between the sales and marketing functions of B-to-B organizations across Canada, the Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA) recently joined forces with the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA), and SiriusDecisions, and launched an exclusive survey. The B-to-B Sales and Marketing Integration Survey uncovered a wealth of exclusive data and knowledge about the efforts and results being achieved by Canadian companies. Here we present the executive summary of findings and insight from the survey.
Communications: One of the key indicators we wanted to probe was the perceived willingness of marketing and sales staff to make their counterparts successful. Respondents reported a general willingness to make the other group successful (57% Yes, 35% 50/50). However as we’ve observed with hundreds of organizations, the greatest challenges to sales and marketing integration are the lack of integrated processes, effective measurement and goal alignment.
The majority of respondents have formal processes in place for regular communications between sales and marketing (63%). But are they the right processes for effective demand creation and lead management? Are roles and responsibilities clear? Are definitions and handoffs clear? Do sales and marketing have common goals in mind?
Goals: When asked to identify their most important goals, marketing respondents indicated that they are clearly focused on lead/demand generation activities (39%) followed by branding/advertising/PR (28%) and product development/launch/introduction (10%). However, it is rather surprising to see that so little attention and focus is being applied to improving relations and collaboration with sales (7%).
On the sales side, it’s no surprise that sales groups are clearly focused on attaining their revenue growth target (35%) followed by increase/grow revenue from existing accounts (27%) and cultivate new accounts/segments (18%). However, it is rather concerning to see so little attention is being applied to improving sales efficiency and productivity (8%).
It appears that despite their willingness to help their counterparts be successful, marketing and sales are focusing on “more of the same” rather than improving what they do and how they do it.
Lead Generation: Since lead generation and development are key areas of integration between sales and marketing, we asked respondents about their efforts in these areas. The majority of respondents admit that their sales and marketing groups spend less than half of their time working together as part of their lead process (56%).
Expectations are a key part of the equation. We asked sales professionals about their expectations for marketing’s contribution as a percentage of pipeline, the responses reveal that dependence on marketing contributed leads runs the gambit. Most interesting are the more than 15% of respondents that expect marketing to contribute more than 41% of the sales pipeline. SiriusDecisions research indicates that for most companies, that expectation is unreasonably optimistic and can lead to a poor view of marketing if it fails to deliver. Perhaps with such high expectations of marketing‘s contribution to the pipeline, it is not surprising that almost two thirds of respondents rated their marketing group’s efforts as less than good.
The end results of efforts are dependent on skills, resources, processes, and collaboration. Many of marketing efforts and subsequent results can be traced directly to an organizations’ demand creation strategy. The data collected indicates that there is plenty of room for improving respondents’ lead qualification and handling processes. It is not just a matter of getting more leads into the sales process, but getting better qualified leads into the hands of the sales force.
Campaigns: With such high expectations for marketing sourced leads, why do more than two thirds of respondents commission less than five lead generation campaigns each year? But the end goal should not be only to run more campaigns. Sales and marketing must work together to segment and target their efforts to result in better lead qualification and conversion rates from first inquiry to closed sale.
Customer Buying Process: The old approach still in place at many organizations is to align efforts, knowledge and collateral to specific stages of the selling cycle. But increasingly, best practice companies have shown that understanding and aligning with the customer’s buying process is far more important. When asked about this, more than 75% of respondents reported that their selling process is not fully aligned with the customer’s buying process. Just as there is much work to do around the lead definition and management process, and better target campaigns, sales needs to improve their understanding of an alignment with their customers’ buying process.
Recommendations: Based on the analysis of the data and information collected from this survey, we present the following 5 key recommendations:
1. Sales and marketing Integration will only work with buy in and leadership from senior marketing and sales management.
2. Alignment begins by identifying the strategies, processes and systems which must work together.
3. Organizations need to reconcile their current sales process with their customer’s buying process. Use the customer buying cycle as a tool to communicate with marketing.
4. Sales needs to agree with marketing on the lead types that need to be created, the lead definitions, and the actions sales will take with leads provided to them.
5. Organizations need to focus on improving campaign and program efficiency. Improved sales and marketing effectiveness can benefit from collecting proven, effective processes and best practices into marketing and sales playbooks.
