Mind the Gap between Sales and Marketing

A key area that companies constantly battle for integration is in their sales and marketing departments. Issues between these two departments can cause significant issues for your company from lost opportunities through to brand damage and lost sales opportunities.

A recent survey of 500 sales and marketing professionals called ‘Closing the Gap:The Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative’ identified a number of issues affecting collaboration between sales and marketing departments. The lack of integration between marketing activities and sales goals has a negative impact on business performance but for those who get it right the rewards are high.

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The report goes on to emphasize that companies still lag in their ability to integrate and align sales goals with marketing activities, thus reducing the overall business performance of their organizations.

The survey found that:

• Less than 20% of companies questioned see their sales and marketing organisations as collaborative
• Sales professionals spend 40% on client focused deliverables, but using less than 50 percent of materials created by marketing
• Yet 85% of the companies brand image and decision to purchase is determined by the direct interaction between the sales force and the customer
• Only 10 – 20% of sales people deliver messaging consistent with corporate messaging
• 46% were dissatisfied with how its company generated new business
• Only 13% of individuals found their CRM applications highly valued
• Sales agreed that lead nurturing and delivering customized value-selling content and presentation materials were highly valued contributions from marketing

Issues in new business sales are not good and will ultimately affect a company’s bottom line. Yet it looks like companies have a long way to go to effectively integrate their sales and marketing operations, but rewards for achieving effective collaboration are great.

We have many years of b2b sales and marketing experience at Incognate and can provide new business development consultancy and also effective telemarketing and lead nurturing campaigns based on a unique and proven new business development model

More information on the CMO’s findings can be found by Downloading a copy of the report here