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Communication between marketing and sales departments within business to business (B2B) organizations remains challenged, according to a ToutApp survey of more than 300 B2B marketers across the U.S.
Among all marketers surveyed, 70 percent said that they want to meet with their sales teams more frequently to review and discuss strategy.
When asked to describe how effective or ineffective inter-team meetings typically are in improving marketing outcomes, the overwhelming majority of those polled, 89 percent, deemed them effective.
There was room for improvement, however, with 51 percent citing them as moderately effective versus 39 percent very effective with just 11 percent of marketers ranking marketing and sales team strategy meetings as ineffective.
“At the end of the day, marketing and sales still interact at a very human level, in meetings. It’s less about mobile, or Web, or desktop, or PowerPoint, but it’s more about overcoming the barrier of speaking the same language,” Tawheed Kader, CEO and founder of ToutApp, told eWEEK. “Marketing always thinks in aggregates and user personas. Sales thinks in terms of prospects, leads and deals. Getting them speaking the same language means talking about how people fit into personas, go through a journey, and then become opportunities.”
The top issue that prevents marketers from meeting with sales to discuss strategy is that marketers believe they measure success differently from sales.
A quarter of respondents picked this as the biggest hurdle, followed by the feeling that their company doesn’t have a system in place for regular meetings (22 percent) and a fundamental difference in goals (16 percent).
When asked to identify what they would like to discuss with sales teams the most, the top focus areas among respondents included lead generation quality and conversion to sales (46 percent), and how messages are received and questions that arise in their delivery (40 percent).
“Social media has forced both sales and marketing to re-think how to interact with customers in an authentic and genuine way,” Kader said. “Marketing blasts on social media seldom works nowadays, whereas salespeople going straight to social and social selling into their potential customers is far more effective. This has resulted in a relationship where marketing creates compelling content and thought pieces that will resonate with the buyer and sales uses the content from marketing to engage in authentic dialogue on Twitter and LinkedIn.”
Two other top issues included problems leads say that they’re facing in sales conversations (32 percent) and competitive companies that come up in sales calls (27 percent).
“The ultimate goal for both of these teams is revenue,” Kader said. “Once both sides align around revenue and track how their own goals and metrics track toward revenue, they’ll all be speaking the same language.”