A new global study by the CMO Council's Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE) shows that many companies worldwide still lag in their ability to integrate and align sales goals with marketing activities, thus reducing the overall business performance of their organizations.
Over 55 percent of some 506 sales and marketing professions surveyed by the CMO Council and its CLOSE community say their companies have yet to, or are only planning to, implement formal programs, systems or processes for unifying sales and marketing functions. In contrast, of those who have, nearly 50 percent report success in synchronizing and optimizing these
often-polarized areas.
While many recognize the benefits of better partnering across these key demand-generating functions, they are being stymied by lack of processes and systems, siloed operations, insufficient management mandate, and ineffective reporting and organizational structures reveals the CLOSE Sales & Marketing Integration Audit fielded by the CMO Council earlier this year.
The study, which reached out to a wide cross-section of marketing, sales and channel management professions worldwide, is part of a new initiative by the CMO Council to more tightly couple sales and marketing in helping companies drive business performance, improve lead quality and conversion rates, and acquire higher value, more profitable customers through better analytics. Through the recently formed online CLOSE community (www.closebiz.org), sponsored by Oracle and The Wall Street Journal, the report aggregates a worldwide audience of sales professionals seeking to further their effectiveness through knowledge exchange, peer-to-peer networking and best practice studies.
"There's a critical need to bridge the divide and educate management about where and how marketing should be powering both the go-to-market process and every step of the lead generation, qualification, closing and account reactivation cycle," noted Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council.
Most respondents in the online survey, considered their companies to be sales-driven and, to a lesser degree, product-centered or customer relationship-based. Just over 10 percent viewed themselves as channel dependent, and only 27 percent believed they were marketing-minded.
However, respondents agree that the top three measures of sales performance and productivity are lead quality and ROI, conversion and close rates, and level of action on opportunities - all very tactical and all tied directly benefited by a deeper alignment and integration between sales and marketing.
When marketers were asked how they viewed sales, 40 percent said they had some top producers but there was mostly a need for improvement. In comparison, sales professionals tended to have a very tactical view of marketing with only 10 percent seeing marketers as market-savvy and on-target with demand-generating campaigns. The vast majority, 41 percent, rated marketing on their ability to provide good content and the right sales support materials.
Key findings from the CMO Council's CLOSE Sales & Marketing Integration Audit showed that:
- Less than 20 percent of respondents say their sales and marketing organizations are extremely collaborative; most felt the two groups had intermittent relations and interactions.
- In looking at ways sales could add value to marketing messaging and communications, survey participants felt engaging strategically with customers to better understand issues and needs was the most valuable contribution.
- In contrast, two of the most important roles marketing could play in optimizing sales performance were fielding campaigns that generated and nurtured leads and opportunities, as well as providing customized value-selling content and presentation materials.
Neither group is effectively leveraging customer data and insight to form deeper, more connected relationships with the customer. Barely 12 percent of sales and marketing professionals say they have a well-integrated, real-time view of all customer interactions, while only 37 percent report good visibility into prospects, pipeline, deal flow and conversion rates. By comparison, 20 percent indicate that marketing hands off leads to sales yet marketing has no insight into conversion and close outcomes, 13 percent say most leads are never captured, qualified or acted upon, and about 11 percent report they have no on-premise or on-demand CRM system in place.
- Among those who have CRM applications, only 13 percent view the application as highly valued and widely deployed, while 42 percent see growing acceptance and adoption.
- While CRM systems tend to be mandated and adopted across the sales organization, they tend to be more selectively embraced by marketing teams in business units and departments.
- Data analytics, reporting and forecasting tend to be the biggest deficiencies in optimizing the functionality and usability of current CRM solutions. The top three areas highlighted by nearly 50 percent of respondents were the ability to easily create analytic reports, customization of the application and forecasting capabilities. Real-time and historic analytics placed a close fourth (40%) adding to the call for more analytics and user friendly tools.
- While 50 percent of those surveyed said they had pretty good or extensive visibility in to customer accounts and business activity, the other 50 percent said they had trouble finding customer account data, did not have enough information, or none at all.
Respondents to the survey were drawn from all industry sectors with over 43 percent in companies with annual sales of $100 million or more. The average sales cycle is 2 to 6 months (36%) with 14% of respondents claiming a sales cycle of 1 to 2+ years. Nearly 70 percent were drawn from BtoB companies.
Virtually all companies operated in North America, over 50 percent in Europe, 47 percent in Asia, 30 percent in Latin America, 26 percent in the Middle East and nearly 20 percent in Africa. Over 35 percent of responding companies had more than 1,000 employees and 65 percent had less than 1,000 employees.
Download the full study now