Report: Sales and Marketing Alignment Still Comes with Challenges

Sales and marketing alignment can help with everything from lead nurturing to demand generation. However, alignment is not always easy to achieve.

InsideView recently published “The State of Sales and Marketing Alignment in 2018: How Leading B2B Companies Drive Growth by Aligning Teams and Go-to-Market Teams” report, and found three major roadblocks to sales and marketing alignment: a lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects (43 percent), communication (43 percent) and measuring with different metrics (41 percent).

When marketers were asked what they need most from sales, the top answer (30 percent) was consistent use of systems. Twenty-two percent stated better lead follow-up, while 19 percent cited feedback on campaigns.

“As marketing gets more deeply involved throughout all stages of the funnel, their actions and successes are directly impacted by the quality of data captured by sales,” wrote the authors of the report. “The data grants necessary visibility into lead, opportunity, pipeline, and forecast insights, and ultimately informs marketing what works and what doesn’t. Without consistent use of systems by the sales team, marketing loses complete line of sight into the outcomes of their efforts.”

Overcoming Sales and Marketing Alignment Obstacles

Despite the challenges that comes with sales and marketing alignment, previous research suggests that marketers may ultimately benefit from overcoming these obstacles in the long-run.

The “2017 State of Inbound” from HubSpot discovered that 61 percent of marketers believe their organization’s marketing strategy is effective. About 44 percent also said that their marketing team was generally aligned with sales. Twenty-two percent stated that they were tightly aligned.

The vast majority (81 percent) of respondents who said their sales and marketing teams were tightly aligned claimed that their marketing strategy was effective. About 66 percent of generally aligned respondents said the same, while just 27 percent of misaligned teams agreed.