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The CMO Council’s new report Sales & Marketing: Driving Revenue Through Collaboration found that more than 70% of marketers don't feel very confident in their sales and marketing model to sell effectively in the digitalized customer journey and to the self- reliant buyer. Here’s an excerpt of the report:

Once a clearly marked road from awareness to conversion, the customer journey has become chaotic. A B2B buying team now can consist of a dozen or more individuals, each with different roles in the buying process, and each conducting research online, and suddenly appearing at different buying stages.

“It’s no longer a sales process, marketing process or a sequential process but a simultaneous one with the customer experience at the center,” says Aditi Uppal, senior director of digital marketing at Teradata. “The ease with which customers find information has made the top of the funnel more relevant to sales, and the bottom of the funnel equally important for marketing.”

Traditionally, marketing would collect and send a bunch of MQLs to sales in a single handoff. Salespeople may or may not have followed up on them. Today, this isn’t good enough. Instead, there needs to be practically daily handoffs of data between marketing and sales, along with relevant insights.

“I strongly feel that the handoff is going away,” Uppal says. “The simultaneous availability of intelligence across stakeholders provides a better sense of what customers are, or might be, doing, and arms sellers with timely and actionable information.”

For instance, let’s say a seller sends information to an account and plans to wait for 5-10 days to hear back. With modern digital analytics, marketing, however, picks up buyer intent signals indicating that the account may be close to signing with a competitor. Sales needs this insight right away to take an action.

With marketing tracking numerous customer data points across first- party and third-party data sources, the ongoing flow of two-way information between sales and marketing requires a robust technology solution and customer data platform to make frequent orchestrations easier and to arm sellers and marketers with the most up-to-date and relevant information across the plethora of the buying team. 

“It’s how you bring it all together to create that thread for seeing what’s happening at the account,” Uppal says. “This ensures that both sales and marketing are aware of where each account is in today’s complex buying cycle. It’s no longer a world of sales ops and marketing ops operating in siloes. Today’s dynamic environment requires a collaborative revenue ops partnership, and modern digital marketing technologies can make this a winning combination.”

Sales & Marketing: Driving Revenue Through Collaboration is based on a survey of over 300 marketing leaders across industries and geographies. Additionally, we conducted in-depth interviews with marketing and or sales executives from Teradata, Schneider Electric, Valpak, Capital Group, Cox Business, Brunswick, and others. Download the full report.

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