70% of CMOs not very confident in current sales & marketing models
So much so that more than 70% of marketers don't feel very confident in their current sales and marketing model to sell effectively in the digitalised customer journey.
This is according to a new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report, produced in partnership with KPMG LLP.
Defining traits of the new sales-marketing relationship
The report, Sales & Marketing: Driving Revenue Through Collaboration examines the marketing and sales relationship and how it should evolve.
It 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
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.
< li>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,” says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council.
Four sales-marketing alignment initiatives
CMOs should adopt four sales-marketing alignment initiatives to better support the digitalised 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 generation.
- 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,” says 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,” he says.
"The next 12 months are critical for marketing and sales teams to integrate data and optimise touchpoints across the customer journey,” he adds.
The report is based on a survey of over 300 marketing leaders across industries and geographies as well as in-depth interviews with marketing and/or sales executives from Teradata, Schneider Electric, Valpak, Capital Group, Cox Business, Brunswick, and others
