Indeed, marketing and sales teams have a long history of being at slight odds with one another. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that two disciplines with completely different functions and expectations should struggle to find common ground. On the other, it does seem counterintuitive that two departments working toward the same revenue goals should find themselves struggling to collaborate.
While many have argued that this natural push and pull between the functions can often generate great outcomes (the idea being that the best ideas come from vigorous debate), recent research is showing that the tide might be changing for a legacy challenge that’s plagued most organizations.
According to LinkedIn’s 2019 State of Sales Report, top sales pros are 13% more likely to engage closely with marketing than in years past. Forty-four percent of sales executives work more closely with marketing than in years past. And those who work “very closely” or “closely” with marketing has grown 35% since 2016. The report’s key takeaway? “Marketing and sales orchestration closes deals.”
“Sales teams in B2B are used to running the show,” says Nick Mason, Founder and CEO of content software company Turtl. “Historically, there has been limited collaboration and integration between marketing and sales, or with service functions for that matter. The digital evolution has led to the rise of low-touch purchasing and a shift of large swaths of the buyer journey away from sales. This has called for the roles of the different functions to be redefined.”
Key to this digital evolution, of course, is data. Thanks to an explosion of turn-key technology solutions now available to marketing teams of every stripe, marketers and sale teams can track and analyze their programs in real-time and most importantly, get a more objective view of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to nurturing and winning business.
“What marketing team hasn’t spent hours on a piece of sales collateral only to have a sales rep decide to deconstruct it, add a page here or there and create their own version?” says Mason. “By using data, both sides of the table now have the option to use engagement data to see which version of a document is more effective.”
