how intelligent technology accelerates marketing and sales … · 2018-03-18 · how intelligent...

How intelligent technology accelerates marketing and sales alignment

Key findings:

How to facilitate data sharing across teams and enable them to make data-backed decisions to win the digitally-native customer

How to create a seamless process flow across marketing and sales departments and prevent teams from operating in siloes

How organizations can add intelligence to their marketing and sales operations

Bond between marketing and sales as the most valuable asset of top-performing companies

#1 The world is accelerating at record pace, and change has become the new normal.

To become and remain successful in such a fluid environment, organizations have

to cope with these changes. Being the lynchpin in networks that create turnover, sales

and marketing teams should be at the center of innovation and change. And for these

departments to drive results and deliver meaningful value to customers in the digital

age, they have to be perfectly aligned and operate as a single mechanism.

01

According to a recent Forrester report, companies with aligned departments enjoyed a 38% higher sales win rate and become 67% better at closing deals. Despite this fact, the silo effect between marketing and sales department still exists remaining one of the significant challenges for companies.

49%

communication

43%

flawed and broken processes

40%

sales and marketing measured by different metrics

According to InsideView, among the top challenges to align sales and marketing are:

The misalignment between marketing and sales has never been as crucial

as it is now, and the problems businesses face nowadays demand urgent reaction.

Challenges:

Accountability matters.

Achieving revenue goals is always one of the main priorities for organizations.

Taking into account that prospects’ budget becomes only tighter, it becomes

harder and harder to generate high-quality leads and successfully close a deal.

Therefore CEOs and other chief managers demand accountability from both

marketing and sales managers, and alignment of the corresponding teams

automatically turns into the top priority to drive revenue growth.

#2Single platform to help teams meet the needs of digitally native customers 32%

Companies that optimize their marketing / sales relationship increase revenue 32% faster. (Aberdeen Group)

87%of companies missing their revenue targets report poor alignment of marketing and sales. (Forbes)

10%Misalignment between sales and marketing technologies and processes costs B2B companies 10% of revenue or more per year. (Maestro Group)

02

#2Single platform to help teams meet the needs of digitally native customers

Customers become more demanding.

By the time a prospect starts interacting with a company, he/she has already

finished more than a half of their problem-solving cycle. And it’s the high time

to provide potential customer with more information, detailed and precise,

on the product or service to ensure the successful deal closure. The solution

a sales rep provides to a particular customer must be based on their specific

requirements and needs, and the message must be delivered in a highly

personalized manner to ensure exceptional customer experience.

Marketplace complexity grows.

Product portfolios, customer requirements, competitive alternatives, ever-

changing market dynamics – everything becomes significantly more complex

and forces organizations to keep pace with this trend. Salespeople and marketers

need help more than ever to reach their quotas and perform effectively.

75%of top-performing organizations have strong alignment between sales and marketing. (Forbes)

208%Companies that aligned sales and marketing generated 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts. (MarketingProfs)

03


Solutions:

Transparency and complete control.

A single platform for sales and marketing can help an organization achieve the

required level of accountability because it makes the lead-to-sales process

transparent by providing complete control over customer communications and

interactions across various touchpoints.

Data-backed approach.

A unified platform for marketing and sales can guarantee that all employees have

the access to the same data that is always relevant and up-to-date. This will

enable them to make data-backed decisions and ensure a seamless customer

experience with the maximum level of personalization.

Higher level of agility.

A unified platform for sales and marketing helps facilitate innovation and

supports transformation initiatives across core business units to meet the

demand of digtally native customers.

68%of companies identify agility as one of their most important initiatives. (Forbes)

44%of executives believe AI’s most important benefit is “automated communications that provide data that can be used to make decisions”. (Narrative Science)

04


Utilizing a single platform to accelerate marketing and sales operations can ensure true

collaboration between sales and marketing pros making their work more measurable,

consistent, efficient and controllable. This will unite your entire organization with the

common goal of creating value, thus maximizing business efficiency. Each department

holds only one piece of the puzzle, and if this information isn’t shared freely, there

is no ability to achieve seamless operation and maximum effectiveness.

67%Companies with aligned departments enjoyed a 38% higher sales win rate and become 67% better at closing deals. (Forrester)

38%When sales and marketing teams work together, companies see 38% higher sales win rates and 36% higher customer retention. (Maestro Group)

50%of organizations with a focused alignment effort in the form of sales enablement saw an increase in sales conversion rates of 10% or more, while 23% increased conversion rates more than 20%. (Highspot)

05

#3Process orchestrationand automation as a way to align core business units

Companies are finding it harder and harder to change the structure of the organization

to be more customer-centric and innovate their organizational models. Companies going

through digital transformation are thinking creatively about organizational alignment and

team dynamics, as seen by the growing trend of the realignment of sales and marketing

teams in B2B companies.

But often these organizational changes stall because the technology creates hard

boundaries that reinforce traditional organization siloes. Companies are placing leaders

in charge of “growth” and “customer experience” as a way of creating connective

tissue between traditional teams, largely because they need people to operate outside

of the normal boundaries and experiment with new technologies — all without

disrupting the status quo.

Highly aligned organizations achieved an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth — while their less aligned competitors saw a 7% decrease in revenue. (Aberdeen Group)32%

To keep pace with ongoing market changes, business needs to focus on core business

units alignment. This can be achieved through process orchestration and automation.

This process also involves application orchestration to unify the apps used by various

teams.

06

Aligning and automating processes

Aligning and automating your processes helps to bridge the gap between marketing

and sales, which enables extensive collaboration opportunities and allows for instant

sharing critical customer data and analytics between departments. This, in turn, creates

a seamless process flow across key organizational departments and prevents teams

from operating in siloes. Forming dynamic and cross-functional teams with a high

degree of collaboration combined with the availability of customer data will enable

companies to improve operational performance and efficiency. Orchestrating business

processes along with a wide range of endpoints and touchpoints empowers

organizations to create an exceptional customer experience.


of business say that intelligent automation (the combined use of artificial intelli-gence and automation) will be put to wider use within their company during the next 12 months. (Accenture)

92%

Companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve 20% annual growth rate.20%

07

According to Jay McBain of Forrester (via ChiefMartech.com), the approximately 100,000 software vendors of today will grow to 1 million hyper-specialized companies by 2027. Data siloes may seem out of control now, but it’s only going to get worse.

App proliferation and data siloes

The proliferation of apps has created an untenable problem for business and IT leaders,

and it seems the pendulum is finally beginning to swing back toward platforms. There

is no doubt we are living in a world filled with apps for just about anything you want

to do. You can peruse hundreds of options to help you with everything from Email

Marketing, Lead Generation, or Project Management to home automation, selling your

old TV, or guiding you in meditation.

This is not an easy problem to solve, especially for B2C companies since many of your

customer data siloes have different unique identifiers or are entirely anonymous. Luckily

for everyone, APIs are standard, and there is a growing list of customer data platforms

(CDPs) that didn’t exist five years ago that collect and connect customer data.

For B2B companies, the data silo should be easier but often isn’t. CRM or BI tools have

been the go-to solution for data aggregation, but many CRM solutions are really just

separate applications with limited (often one-way) data integrations.


08

One of the top reasons the pendulum is swinging back in favor of platforms is simple:

the tech stack needs a more stable foundation. Fewer data siloes and more connected

apps make it easier, faster and infinitely more stable to connect sales and marketing

processes and data sources, and streamline the data flow from one point of the

customer journey to the next. No business team wants to try and automate a workflow

across five separate applications, and no IT team wants to have to support such a thing.

This is a major advantage of applications backed by platforms – workflow and

customizability are not constrained by a single application. Having a unified platform

that can orchestrate data from various apps used and centralize it in one data source

can enable drastic enhancements in communications between marketing and sales

teams by providing them with an ability to share data and collaborate without the need

to switch between various apps.


of companies report high or moderate degrees of data siloes. (CompTIA)80%

experience some degree of shadow (or rogue) data depositories. (CompTIA)2/3

09

#4Applying AI tools to deliver smarter customer experiences

10Artificial intelligence is the next big thing in the world of innovation, powered by

advances in computing power, the ability to store and process Big Data, and instant

access to advanced algorithms. Applying AI can help connect marketing and sales

into a cohesive unit while significantly transforming business outcomes.

Closed loop knowledge-based lead management

With all its benefits, AI makes it possible to create a synergy of marketing and sales that

allows for delivering smarter and more streamlined customer experiences across all

interactions through orchestrated lead management processes.

Lead scoring

Intelligent tools with automated lead scoring are based on AI and BI algorithms

that take the whole pool of accumulated data in the company database and

combine that with “big data” attributes gathered from various sources. So

marketers can more effectively reach their target audiences while sales pros

become more efficient working with the high-quality leads.

Smart lead routing

Intelligent lead routing automatically defines which sales rep receives the lead

based on their expertise, pipeline load or other configurable parameters. Applying

AI-powered tools also allows for allocating a lead to the most suitable sales rep

based on the lead’s preferences, background, and history of interactions that

results in a higher percentage of conversion rate and closed sale.

of users agree that predictive lead scoring provides more value than traditional (map and point-based attribute and activity) lead scoring approaches. (Business 2 Community)90%of respondents say they would purchase predictive lead scoring again. (The SiriusDecisions)98%

Intelligent lead nurturing

Adding AI enables organizations to run intelligent nurturing campaigns. With the

help of intelligent tools marketing teams can deeply analyze lead data such as

their browsing activities, profile information, purchasing behavior, and service

requests among others, and then automatically assign the lead to the most

relevant lead nurturing campaign and share the valuable customer insights with

sales.


Source/Content Attribution

Understanding the full cycle sales funnel allows for creating high quality content

that attracts and keeps customers engaged. Contribution of both marketing and

sales departments to content creation ensures that the content investments are

paid back in high quality leads and more deals are won. It is especially important

considering that a lead can have multiple sources to retrieve the information

before contacting the sales rep. Solidifying the attribution back to key sources

of incoming leads will help marketers increase investments in the right sources

that deliver the best results for sales generating not just lead volume but also

revenue.

Companies with mature lead generation and management practices have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate. (CSO Insights)9.3%

Up to 70% of marketing content goes unused. (Sparklane group)70%of B2B marketers use content marketing to drive sales. (Sparklane group)88%

of B2B marketers have plans to increase budgets for content this year. (Sparklane group)39%

11

Data-backed strategies through intelligent forecasts

According to CSO Insights, fewer than 50 percent of deals close as originally

forecasted. While AI helps marketers predict what each of their customers wants even

before they know it, revenue-based strategies should focus not only on marketing

objectives, but to comprise common sales and marketing goals to help organizations

shrink the visibility gap between the key teams.

Intelligent marketing and sales forecasting

The tool is aimed to have a more accurate sense of what is most likely to happen

with specific marketing campaigns and how this change will impact the sales

volume. Using the same context-based intelligence that enables intelligent lead

management, as well as the constant revisions that improve predictions,

intelligent tools can provide a complete view of projected marketing and sales

processes outcomes and significantly increase a forecast’s accuracy.

Joint sales and marketing strategies

Powered by data-based insights, organizations can build a strategy that

encompasses multiple elements of marketing and sales interactions that direct

impact the organization’s ability to deliver customer centricity in the first place.

Amplified with content allocation and forecasting, tools for joint strategy

development can get sales and marketing teams in agreement about the target

audiences, buyer personas, quantitative and qualitative definitions of a lead.


of sales organizations miss their forecast by more than 10%. (Sirius Decisions)79%Truly insights-driven businesses will steal $1.2 trillion per annum from their less-informed peers by 2020. (Forrester)$1.2 tln

12

Leveraging the power of AI to streamline customer interactions across

the entire customer journey

In addition, AI technology enable organizations to connect customer insights to differen-

tiate the buying process, provide streamlined and more consistent omnichannel cus-

tomer experiences.

Intelligent data enrichment

With this tool, sales and marketing professionals get a better understanding

of the resources required to generate and convert a specific lead into

an opportunity. It includes an ability to automatically append missing or additional

information from external 3rd party sources and integrated data cleansing

capabilities.

Enhanced communications with customers

AI-powered tools enable marketing and sales professionals to tie activity

on a company’s website to the contact data, or take into account the previous

communication history with the specific contact. This helps to determine whether

the contact should be directed to marketing or sales department, to prompt the

most relevant communication channel, time to reach out and even suggest the

most suitable tone of voice.

Streamlined processes on all stages of the customer interactions

An intelligent CRM solution enables businesses to effectively handle the entire

customer journey, starting from the automated marketing processes to sales and

service interactions.



37% Recent research shows that 37% of companies experience difficulties converting data into actionable insight. (YF Research)

13

ConclusionIn today’s fast-paced digital environment where customers have unlimited access and are well-informed about your brand

and products, marketing and sales departments can no longer stick to their siloed mentality since both departments have

identical objectives: generating and converting leads. Combining machine learning with human input can help streamline

the collaboration between marketing and sales. Utilizing AI-powered platform with BPM capabilities can enable marketing

and sales professionals to have more fruitful collaboration and better data sharing in order to cultivate a culture of honesty

and transparency.

Taking advantage of intelligent platfroms, businesses can effectively orchestrate core business processes, developing

customer-centric strategies based on smarter and better quality customer data that is instantly shared across key

departments. Synchronizing marketing and sales teams ensures an increased number of deals won, helps to deliver more

personalized customer experiences as well as enables businesses to build a more trustworthy and transparent relationship

between marketing and sales pros.

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how intelligent technology accelerates marketing and sales … · 2018-03-18 · how intelligent...

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