marketing / sales alignment 2016: who is agile enough … · 4 marketing / sales alignment 2016:...

Are there still B2B marketers out there who believe their responsibilities are limited to generating as many leads as possible? Or salespeople willing to blame those leads as a rationale for under-performing? Perhaps, but not among Best-in-Class enterprises, who adopt the best practices and deploy the right technologies explored in this report to create mutually beneficial wins for both teams.

MARKETING / SALES ALIGNMENT 2016: WHO IS AGILE ENOUGH TO WIN? March 2016 Peter Ostrow, VP/Research Group Director,

Customer Management, Sales Effectiveness

Report Highlights

Best-in-Class firms are 38% more likely to ensure always-on availability of marketing-generated sales content.

Companies that optimize the marketing / sales relationship grow revenue 32% faster.

Expanding the CRM to include marketing automation and other integrated tools yields 32% higher total sales team attainment of quota.

The Best-in-Class are 91% more likely to deploy enterprise social collaboration platforms.

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Marketing / Sales Alignment 2016: Who is Agile Enough to Win?

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Once upon a time, marketing and sales teams, and especially their respective leadership, rarely played well in the sandbox together. Within business-to-business (B2B) organizations, the objectives and compensation motivators for the two functions were rarely in line with one another, even when the mutual outcome — unlocking revenue from buyers — was shared between them. Marketing was held accountable primarily for volume: the more leads, registrations, clicks, and eyeballs could they pump into the customer relationship management (CRM) system, the better; if the sales practitioners couldn't close deals, well, that was their problem. In the purview of the front-line sellers, however, the expectations around the pipeline generated by the marketing team were focused on quality rather than quantity: "how can I possibly hit my number when all I'm given are these awful leads?"

Aligning Toward a Better Way

Today, however, an increasing number of B2B enterprises have evolved their thinking around whether such a combative relationship is actually beneficial to the company as a whole. What would happen if, many practitioners now stop to think, we found a way to create more overlap in the Venn diagram of the marketing / sales relationship, in terms of what success for each team actually looks like? Are there shared technology platforms and, more importantly, shared motivations to aggressively using such tools that can capture and promote a better spirit of collaboration? What does true alignment look like, how can it be achieved, and is it worthwhile?

In Aberdeen’s Sales Effectiveness 2015: How in the World Are We Going to Hit Our Number? (June 2015), we identified a cohort of top-performing sales organizations identified as the Best-in-Class (sidebar, page 4). In a new view of the results (Figure 1), we

B2B success today requires changing the traditionally combative relationship between marketing and sales.

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are able to identify a large collection of best practices that are more frequently adopted around marketing / sales alignment by the most successful firms:

Figure I: Agile LOB Leaders Bring Sales and Marketing Together

Agreeing on "what is it lead?" sounds relatively simple, but a remarkable number of modern B2B sellers still think of it as a four-letter word. The term often spurs an eye-rolling critique around whether a report download or webinar registration actually represents a potential buyer. Top performers, however, are more likely to recognize that proactive collaboration around specific lead attributes helps both marketers and sellers spend less time arguing about definitions, and more energy delivering on quality pipeline opportunities. Inside sales or business development rep (BDR), lead qualification and lead scoring solutions also help reduce the wasteful


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and annoying back-and-forth around lead quality that saves exactly no one any time.

We know from the research that always-on sales content availability is a consistent Best-in-Class deployment of sales enablement platforms. Marketers have a legitimate need to protect and control the corporate brand, and this is why they inevitably seem like the “Vice Presidents of Sales Prevention” at times. However, such solutions effectively allow them to proactively create applicable content for the various industries, geographies, and buying personas that their sales counterparts are likely to face. The best of these tools also allow both teams to track buyer engagement with content, helping them collaboratively understand what is working in the field and what needs to be adapted from a created or targeting standpoint. The ability for quota-carriers to select and create personalized marketing content effectively eliminates the traditional frustrations among sellers that the marketing team tries to force them to use one-size-fits-all messaging with their buyers.

Finally, as much as Best-in-Class companies are more likely to deploy BDR support as a vital qualification step in between short lead generation and pass-through to the sellers, marketing-led lead nurturing is also more highly valued by top performers. In a content-driven world, this means that it is vital to build effective B2B marketing campaigns that create an omni-channel buyer experience and rely upon a variety of content form factors, such as short-form infographics, videos, and even research reports such as this one.

The Sales Effectiveness Best-in-Class Defined In March through May of 2015, Aberdeen surveyed 322 end-user organizations to understand their sales effectiveness best practices. The performance metrics used to define the Best-in-Class (top 20%), Industry Average (middle 50%), and Laggard (bottom 30%) among these sales teams are: • 72% of sales reps achieving quota, vs. 48% among Industry Average, and 37% for Laggard firms • 7.4% average year-over-year increase in average deal size, vs. a 2.8% increase for the Industry Average, and a 5.7% decline among Laggard respondents • 6.7% average year-over-year improvement in (reduction of) the average sales cycle, vs. 0.4% and 15.8% worsening of (growth in) cycles for Industry Average and Laggard respondents, respectively

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How Do I Know if All This Effort is Worthwhile? Where Do I Start?

Admittedly, deploying even some of the elements from Figure 1 can seem overwhelming, especially for those organizations who have yet to consider marketing / sales alignment as a source of overall business improvement. As we see in Figure 2, a wide variety of metrics indicating success for both teams reveal themselves as annualized performance improvements that are far stronger for optimized teams (those with a strong internal marketing / sales relationship) compared with those who indicated to Aberdeen that they have not yet seen the light:

Figure 2: The Numbers Tell the Story: Why Alignment is Worth the Effort

These results do not, of course, occur in a vacuum. As any practitioner knows, a spirit of cooperation accomplishes nothing without both a physical and metaphorical platform to support it. As to the former, Aberdeen’s research consistently showcases CRM not as the one and only final destination for sales technology enablement, but as a foundation upon which other solutions add situation-specific value. By itself, CRM is an

Too many modern sellers think “lead”

is a four-letter word.

A complete, real-time view of the customer is crucial to creating effective utilization

of resources for all customer-facing

teams: marketing, sales, and service.


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adequate hub of the sales effectiveness wheel, but requires multiple spokes in order to serve the needs of modern sales organizations providing complex goods and services to ever more savvy buyers. In the context of this discussion, we know from CRM + Sales Technologies: Integrating Your Way Toward President's Club (February 2015) that Best-in-Class companies lead under-performers in connecting other enterprise applications to the CRM. This includes the marketing automation platform, which is so crucial to their counterparts on the lead generation side of the house. In fact, once we begin to recognize that the basic platform is pretty much a table-stakes requirement for 21st century sales organizations, it's more relevant to turn our attention to the concept of "CRM Expanders," identified by Aberdeen as those organizations indicating a significant and ongoing commitment to integrating multiple marketing and selling technology platforms into the hub of the wheel.

Figure 3: Turning a System of Record into a System of Engagement

Again, as to whether this effort yields measurable business value, consider the data in Figure 3. Companies that align sales

The best sales enablement tools allow both teams to track buyer engagement with content, helping them collaboratively understand what is working in the field and what needs to be adapted from a created or targeting standpoint.

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and marketing efforts in this way enjoy stronger customer retention rates as well as more efficient bottom-of-funnel sales results.

It’s All About That Data

Integrating marketing automation and other pipeline-building solutions into the CRM is only a valuable exercise if both organizations recognize that, because modern buyers are far more savvy about our goods and services than ever before, the data used to target and close in on revenue must be as accurate and available as possible. Analytics Meets Enablement: Data-Driven Content in Context (October 2015) teaches us that Best-in-Class enterprises place a significant premium on acquiring a data-driven understanding of exactly which marketing content is consumed by precisely which target audience, in exact quantities and known frequencies. Top performers then link these analytical learnings directly to contacts, accounts, and opportunities in the CRM to effectively inform sellers about the propensity for their various prospects to turn into buyers. Such a complete, real-time view of the customer is crucial to creating effective utilization of resources for all customer-facing teams: marketing, sales, and service. The opposite of owning accurate data about the target market is reflected on the right-hand side of the V-shaped data presented in Figure 4.

CRM does not stand alone. It needs to be the foundation upon which

other solutions add situation-specific value.


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Figure 4: With a Unified Approach to Customer-Oriented Data, Top Performers Market, Sell, and Service More Effectively

Here, we see clear evidence that top-performing companies have taken the time to invest in data accuracy around their prospects’ and customers’ behavior. The Best-in-Class recognize that in a complex B2B market, sophisticated consumers of their goods and services have more information than ever before at their disposal about their products, pricing, and essentially every negative thing that has ever been posted about them. The only way to remain competitive in this challenging environment is to devote ongoing resources to ensuring that customer data is clean and accurate. Data integrity is a lifestyle, not an event, after all. This refers not only to flat demographic and firmographic details about individuals and their companies, but also to their behavior. This is where connecting marketing automation and CRM platforms makes the most sense. Predictive analytics capabilities are also now baked into most of these commercial solutions. This helps smart organizations use

Integrating marketing automation and other pipeline-building solutions into the CRM is a valuable exercise only if both organizations recognize that because modern buyers are far more savvy about our goods and services than ever before.

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automation to identify how best to proceed with current pipeline opportunities, based on past marketing and selling success.

Why Leveraging Tribal Knowledge is Vital

Another way that Best-in-Class companies add to their knowledge regarding effective marketing and quota-busting selling is by recognizing how the modern workforce has evolved due to social collaboration. Prior to the time when Millennials began to dominate the B2B sales workforce, most of the corporate wisdom flowed downhill from executives and managers to the individual contributor level. Watercooler talk might have been helpful at times, but it was not until the digital age that enterprise employees had the opportunity to leverage the enormous knowledge of the “hive.” From a technology standpoint, Aberdeen identifies enterprise social collaboration as the family of platforms designed to foster the 21st century iteration of the watercooler that we have now all come to take for granted. Today's marketing and sales practitioners, particularly in Best-in-Class companies, are supported by applications that promote the free exchange of ideas, best practices, and wisdom. As we see in Figure 5, these top performers are 91% more likely than All Others (67% vs. 35%) to report to Aberdeen that they have an active or highly active deployment of such platforms.


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Figure 5: Collaboration is No Longer a Nice-to-Have

Most marketing automation and CRM offerings today include this knowledge-sharing capability, which helps to drive the accuracy and effectiveness of pipeline-building data to new heights. Now, let's explore where and how such knowledge acquisition is most effectively deployed.

Oh Pipeline, Wherefore Art Thou?

Little needs to be said about modern professionals’ need to accomplish their jobs when traveling and using mobile devices. We know from CRM + Sales Mobility: Enabling Your Multi-Screen Seller (February 2015) that Best-in-Class organizations create a seamless availability for quota-carriers to see, access, and manipulate data and documents regardless of their physical location or whichever form factor they are using to compute. This includes access to the two primary deliverables that the marketing team provides to the front line: full details on leads that go into the pipeline, and content that is pre-positioned to serve their needs when interfacing with buyers and customers. And yet, as we see in Figure 6, most companies (particularly under-performers) have yet to truly support their sales reps, channel partners, and marketing campaign managers with the

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ability to get their work done regardless of location, time, device, or connectivity.

Figure 6: Modern Sellers Requires Anywhere, Anytime, Any Device Support

The x-axis labels on Figure 6 include an editorial liberty, based on the fact that it is hard to argue an effective case, in 2016, for still requiring individual contributors on these teams to wait until they are back in the office after market-facing activities to wrap up their meeting notes and campaign results. Hence, the reason that Laggard firms are 63% more likely than the Best-in-Class (80% vs. 49%) to force an “old way” of work on Millennials, who are likely to find it awkward and unproductive, is hard to believe. No wonder Best-in-Class companies report a year-over-year reduction in sales employee turnover of 1.2%, compared with 0.7% and 7.2% increases among Industry Average and Laggard firms, respectively. Considering that it costs over $29k and takes 7.2 months to fully replace a typical B2B sales rep, there can be little doubt that fully mobilizing the marketing and

Data integrity is a lifestyle, not an event.


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sales teams responsible for customer acquisition is no longer a luxury.

Conclusion and Recommendations

One thing that most modern professionals desire more than anything else, is more time to perform their job better. We are all trying to get more done in a 24/7 world and, hopefully, salvage some personal time while still hitting our marketing and sales numbers. This always-on sensibility is why marketing campaigns are served up through automated platforms, and sales workflow technologies are deployed to fill and develop bigger pipelines. As we see in Figure 7, top-performing organizations force their front-line sellers and channel partners to spend 25% less time not doing their job — i.e. searching for information and content rather than more effectively deploying it in real-life interactions with their buyers. We have learned here that when marketing and sales leaders collaborate around content accessibility and customer data, everyone wins. A crucial focus for practitioners seeking to embrace the conductivity between their marketing and sales technology platforms must be geared toward this constant question: will this give our team members more time to build a better pipeline?

We live in an era when sales practitioners are challenged by the fact that buyers can obtain so much knowledge about what we are selling, before ever communicating with us. Thus, every opportunity to maximize the time spent actually interacting with prospects and customers has to be supported by the technologies and processes deployed around such initiatives.

Today's marketing and sales practitioners, particularly in Best-in-Class companies, are supported by applications that promote the free flow of ideas, best practices, and wisdom.

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Figure 7: What’s in YOUR Calendar?

Given the mobilization and personalization of virtually every application we now deploy as consumers, it becomes more of an imperative to make sure that our business technologies keep up with the times. If for no other reason, recruiting and retaining top talent becomes easier when we do. The ultimate reason, however — customer care — serves as a final driver for change.

For more information on this or other research topics, please visit www.aberdeen.com.

Related Research Best-in-Class Sales Enablement Via Video-Based Learning; January 2016 Maximizing the Sales Technology Ecosystem with Best-in-Class CPQ Deployments; January 2016 Sales Performance Management 2016: How the Best-in-Class Evolve Success; December 2015

Best-in-Class Paths to Shorten the Sales Cycle; December 2015 Tired of Stressing on the Monday Sales Meeting? There's a Better Way to Win!; October 2015 What Motivates Best-in-Class B2B Sellers? You'll Be Surprised; October 2015

Author: Peter Ostrow, VP/Research Group Director; Customer Management, Sales Effectiveness; [email protected]

A crucial focus for practitioners seeking to embrace the

conductivity between their marketing and sales technology

platforms must be geared toward this constant question: will this

give our team members more time to build a better pipeline?


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About Aberdeen Group

Since 1988, Aberdeen Group has published research that helps businesses worldwide improve their performance. Our analysts derive fact-based, vendor-agnostic insights from a proprietary analytical framework, which identifies Best-in-Class organizations from primary research conducted with industry practitioners. The resulting research content is used by hundreds of thousands of business professionals to drive smarter decision-making and improve business strategy. Aberdeen Group is headquartered in Boston, MA.

This document is the result of primary research performed by Aberdeen Group and represents the best analysis available at the time of publication. Unless otherwise noted, the entire contents of this publication are copyrighted by Aberdeen Group and may not be reproduced, distributed, archived, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent by Aberdeen Group.

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