Marketing and sales have often established a less-than-seamless relationship—and to what end?
Poor customer experience, gossip in the office kitchen, and a ton of wasted resources.
As customer and prospect expectations for consistency and clear messaging continues to rise, alignment between these two teams is more critical than ever.
Did you know:
Over half of marketers don’t know which assets sales uses most
But, wait—sales isn’t off the hook here.
Even more sales members don’t know which assets are used most by fellow salespeople
With over half of the teams unsure of content use, it’s safe to say content performance isn’t being properly evaluated and used to inform future distribution.
Download the full report here.
The Worst Offenders
Lack of visibility is a clear precursor to misalignment. Not surprisingly, we found more symptoms of poor alignment:
33% of teams don’t have a standing meeting
If one in three teams aren’t even meeting regularly, things are going to fall through the cracks. Whether sales has valuable feedback on effective messaging (they do) that’s lost in the ether, or marketing creates incredible content (they do, too) that goes unseen and unused, opportunities will be lost.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
Here’s a surprising stat: 1 in 2 respondents self-reported that their marketing and sales teams were aligned.
That’s not great, but it’s certainly not as bad as you’d expect, considering the general lack of alignment I’ve already reported.
So—do you believe it? We don’t.
Sure, you might feel aligned, there might be no gossip in sales about marketing or vice versa, and marketing and sales leadership might have a quarterly meeting—but even the teams that were “aligned” showed alarming ignorance when it came to content strategy and performance.
The greatest barriers to alignment are:
- Lack of communication
- Poorly defined vision
- Lack of visibility into content production and usage
Do your teams suffer from any of these? If so, I’ve got news for you: you aren’t quite there yet.
Get the Full Report
Want to see how your team stacks up? Download the full report.
Even better—want to prove you’re at the forefront of alignment? Forward the report to your sales/marketing colleagues. Alignment starts with communication, after all.
