Marketing & Sales Integration€¦ · Marketing has progressed from a mass-approach to a personalized approach. It is now putting in efforts into converting its campaign audience

MARKETING & SALES WITNESSING THE BIGGEST BUSINESS INTEGRATION

Who determines the target customer?

Who controls the buying process?

Who rakes in revenue?

Yes, both Marketing & Sales. Neither can do it alone. Functioning in silo is not a

possibility in today’s connected world anyway. In any organisation, Marketing &

Sales are critical functions and the kind of relationship both share is pivotal to

the organisation’s success.

Sporting different focus areas, with Marketing being more concerned about

brand awareness and lead generation and Sales pursuing lead closures and

boosting conversion rates, the eventual goal is common – revenue maximization.

In this paper, we have attempted to understand the evolving ambit of Marketing

& Sales and whether it is their integration or collaboration that is the way

forward.

©Denave2018

FOREWORD

#DenaveInsights ©Denave

We are immensely thankful to all the marketing veterans for participating and

sharing their expert opinions on the various aspects of this topic. The views

shared are purely their personal opinions and is not reflective of the brand they

represent. This eBook would not be a reality without their support.

©Denave2018

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT


The Big Q!

Fact - As per research, misalignment between sales and marketing significantly

impacts revenue with lost sales and wasted marketing outlay costing companies

$1 trillion a year.1

Yet, this is not a common occurrence. Traditionally, Marketing and Sales have

occupied two different spaces in the entire gamut of business functions.

Marketing was positioned at the top of the sales funnel carrying the

responsibility of lead generation, and Sales was saddled with the lead

conversion. While Marketing did the market research, created brand awareness

and supplied both the leads and the content to Sales to help them attain

closures, Sales took the ownership of customer relationship and skilfully aimed

to convert the prospects into customers.

ALLIES OR ADVERSARIES


Looking closely, each is dependent on the other. Sales depend on Marketing for

customer relevant content and leads while Marketing depends on Sales for

gathering on-ground insights, understanding the pain points of the customer

and generating further customer relevant content. Unless the knowledge of the

sales team is converted into the essence of the marketing content, optimal lead

conversion shall remain a fantasy.

ALLIES OR ADVERSARIES


While it makes sense for the two to ally, the perfect integration is still far from

reality for most organisations. Even though 80% of businesses recognise the

benefits of greater alignment between sales and marketing, most (60%) aren’t

unifying their divisions.2

However, there are evident signs of evolution and changing mindset in the

industry. Marketing has progressed from a mass-approach to a personalized

approach. It is now putting in efforts into converting its campaign audience

into customers – as such, a sales team job. The sales team is channelizing

their energies into understanding the buyer better by looking into the

marketing campaigns in-depth – as such, a marketeer’s job.

WINDS OF CHANGEThe traditional B2B buyer decision journey where sales is

responsible for meeting, educating, and closing while

marketing is responsible for qualified lead generation is

dead. Buyers today are constantly jumping decision

stages and there is more democratization in purchase

today - this puts marketing focus on delivering sharper

awareness and consideration with both visible and

invisible stakeholders.

SRIRAM

GOPALASWAMY,

Head – Commercial

Marketing, Lenovo India

Today’s B2B buyers may not need the help of a

salesperson as they did a decade ago. Instead, they

rely on thought-leadership content, product reviews,

case studies and peer recommendations that

marketing teams develop to nurture prospects.

LLOYD MATHIAS,

Angel Investor & Former

APAC Marketing Head, HP Inc


Fitting into each other’s shoes and understanding the commonality of the

final goal is slowly putting things into perspective. Both the teams are now

beginning to implement ways to complement each other effectively. Also,

the realisation of the common good has fastened the pace for the

collaborative functioning. As such, the integration becomes a natural

progression.

The advent of digital era has brought forth new dynamics into the

relationship with the reins being firmly held by the new age customer. In

fact, technology has played a dual catalyst role here – a reason for causing

this paradigm shift, as well as an enabler for assisting the trend to pick up

motion.

The marketing function has been impacted a lot by digital,

e-commerce and data analytics in the last 5 years. The

traditional media while is still used to create mass

awareness and build brands but CRM & digital have

enabled targeting of individual customers rather than

targeting a large target of consumers. The real-time

responses, the widening of media has also led to

democratisation of the marketing function and more

decisions being made by middle and lower management.

UMMED SINGH,

Head – Marketing, ITC Limited, (Lifestyle Retail

Business Division)

The input for a successful sales or marketing function is

essentially the same – market information, customer

knowledge, pattern and trend mapping etc. With these

two existing as divided entities, it’s mainly a loss of time,

effort, money and opportunities. One revenue team is the

way to go – yes, they can work as sub-functions for the

expertise they provide – but they definitely need to roll up

under one.

SHUBHRA SINHA,

AVP – Marketing &

Digital Strategy, Denave

WINDS OF CHANGE


IS MARKETING THE NEW SALES?

Both marketing and sales will need to function seamlessly for the business to

thrive. With the lines blurring and consumer expectations growing, the two

functions will need to be more agile and proactive instead of protecting their

turf.

LLOYD MATHIAS,

Angel Investor & Former APAC Marketing Head, HP Inc

I'd consider moving sales and marketing into single customer experience team.

While marketing is responsible for not just leading the customer into the mouth

of a funnel, but also manage the customer journey post-sales; the sales team is

responsible for the last-mile customer experience which is the most critical to

brand consideration.

SRIRAM GOPALASWAMY,

Head – Commercial Marketing, Lenovo India

Both functions need to be integrated better, but care needs to be taken to

ensure that all marketing initiatives are not focused on short term sales. Brand

building and consumer engagement initiatives should not be focused on

generating short-term sales.

UMMED SINGH,

Head – Marketing, ITC Limited (Lifestyle Retail Business Division)

The way sales is evolving from the days of cold customer outreach to becoming

targeted and consultative, and the way marketing now looks at ROI and SQL

(not just MQL), both seem to be responding to the friendship call. With the

emergence of the new-age buyer, it’s not about one being the other, but about

the two joining forces to become one rock-solid army – that forms the

backbone of a successful organisation.

SHUBHRA SINHA,

AVP – Marketing & Digital Strategy, Denave

Today’s customers in B2B or B2C environment have more power, more

information, and the ability to research and understand the product/services

offered. In such a scenario, marketing can play a very critical role and help the

organization adapt to the new market dynamics by working together with sales

as one integrated team.

MOHIT VERMA,

Senior Director – Marketing, GEP Worldwide


The factor to be considered before bringing in the integration is to ensure

that the inhibition towards complete integration doesn’t mar the requisite

overlap. For example, keeping something as basic as the software usage

non-integrated means sales team using their CRM and marketing team

leveraging their marketing automation platform but not sharing any data

with each other. Meaning, leads from marketing automation are not being

worked upon by sales and marketing team remaining devoid of any

intrinsic info on the customer/prospect which sales has gauged.

WEIGHING THE VERDICT

A complete integration of the process is always

beneficiary as the business can be planned, organized

and executed in cohesion right from the beginning. If

there is a mere collaboration, it still leaves gaps and

loop holes which result in lesser or delayed benefits. The

high point of this partnership is not only ability to plan

together, but also track, implement and convert the

opportunities by complementing continuously instead of

sporadic support.

NAMIT AGRAWAL,

Marketing Lead – Asia, HCL Technologies

There cannot be a complete integration as Sales

departments are typically oriented towards short-term

target setting, whereas Marketing needs to have an

orientation towards discipline, focus and consistency.

RUCHIN KHANDUJA,

Senior GM – Marketing, HSIL Ltd.


Integrating sales and marketing teams as equal partners makes most sense

today. Tighter integration of these two critical teams can benefit the enterprise

in many ways. When the teams are integrated, their goals are also aligned

whether it is brand awareness or lead generation, in a cohesive way, leading to

much better outcomes. Further, it can significantly improve customer

engagement, understanding of customer journey impacting the lead flow

considerably and enabling the enterprise to optimize its engagement program.

MOHIT VERMA,

Senior Director – Marketing, GEP Worldwide

To achieve the right alignment, it is imperative to identify and focus on areas

that gives scope of successful collaboration underlying their common goal of

successfully influencing the customer through its journey. Not to forget,

customer’s purchase pattern and decision-making parameters are continuously

evolving in today’s day and age. A study suggests that if both the functions work

in collaboration then many companies experience a 20% increase in their sales.3

Over the past years Marketing and sales function have evolved with the degree

and avenues of customer engagement deciding the pace of this evolution. The

prominent tools and technology of managing customer relationship – Analytics,

CRM, social listening etc are being jointly used and leveraged by both Marketing

and Sales. Certainly, they seem to be traversing the common grounds now.

In successful organisations the departments have never worked in silos. The

intensity of collaboration could have been lower due to limited availability

of tools to impact sales. The evolution is good for the functions, the brand

and the organisation. Integrated departments allow both functions to learn

more about the brand, the business and the consumers. This will let both

departments to fine tune their strategies and provide a better offering.

UMMED SINGH,

Head – Marketing, ITC Limited

(Lifestyle Retail Business Division)


WEIGHING THE VERDICT

Technology is continually advancing. In tandem, both the customer’s journey as

well as tools available to Marketing for message delivery also continue to evolve.

Sales bring in the much-needed personal touch to this entire process making it

more relational than transactional – a business strategy towards achieving new

sales closure and boosting customer retention. Both depend on each other

heavily to find solution to the perennial problem – ‘What does customer really

want?’.

It is at this juncture the ‘Revenue Team’ emerges forging the age of team work

rather than passing the baton. The members align and collaborate and when

required integrate thus blurring any remnants of contention between the two.

©Denave2018

RISE OF THE REVENUE TEAM


Surely, poor integration between the two spells disaster for company’s balance

sheets besides leaving a trail of duplicated efforts and a bunch of confused

customers. Nearly half of marketing and sales professionals rate the main challenge

pertaining to their mutual alignment and eventual lead closures as communication

followed by broken or flawed processes (42%), use of different metrics (40%), lack

of accurate data on target accounts (39%) and reporting challenges (27%).4

The list of non-negotiables for making the task of integration easier is lengthy. It

starts right from goal’s alignment to merged KPIs. In the process, there needs to be

a common conversation platform as well as mutual accountability for it to be

successful. Needless to add, what makes or breaks this integration is the ecosystem.

Striving for establishing an environment where opinions, disagreements and

perspectives are valued, is the way to go.

©Denave2018

ATTAINING PERFECT ALIGNMENT


It’s the art of mastering co-leverage that gets the teams closer to the

desired result.ATTAINING PERFECT ALIGNMENT

A proper channel for bridging communication between the teams

and usage of common technology platforms such as CRM and

marketing automation tools to allow complete visibility to both the

groups into overall sales and marketing activities are important for

bridging the gap between these two. Another important step is

metrics alignment. Marketing should align some of its metrics with

sales such as form fills, marketing qualified leads, sales accepted

leads, and understand their impact on sales qualified leads.

Simultaneously, they need to help sales reps understand why

marketing metrics matter and how they can help make sales easier.

MOHIT VERMA,

Senior Director – Marketing,

GEP Worldwide

I think the fact that marketing measurement has moved

beyond measuring only communication effectiveness to

measuring leads and conversions aligns it better to business.

This has been a significant step along with the orientation to

digital - a medium that lends itself better to two-way

communication and real-time consumer feedback. Going

forward, the lead management processes must align closely

with the way the sales org handles outreach and tracks

prospects/customer insights. At the same time, Marketing

requires full visibility into the process – status, disposition of

leads, rejection of leads and so on.

LLOYD MATHIAS,

Angel Investor &

Former APAC Marketing Head, HP Inc


I think what will make this integration faster is the emergence of hybrid roles –

those who are made responsible to remove this divide. Another important step

would be to make the interaction as frequent, possibly on everything. The

opinion difference can exist, but there needs to be awareness on what the other

is doing. Then of course, multiple things like clear role mapping, expectation

setting, KPI setting, evolution in existing roles etc. are all add-ons. Automation is

going to be the driver of this change – whether it’s intelligent CRM or advanced

marketing automation tools – they are all critical to achieve this desired

integration.

SHUBHRA SINHA,

AVP – Marketing & Digital Strategy, Denave

The goals for every campaign should be clearly laid out and there should be a

pragmatic approach – the deliverables of a branding or CSR campaign would

be very different from a product/ service specific lead gen one. All the

campaigns should carry a qualitative component with associated

responsibilities instead of just dwelling upon numbers.

NAMIT AGRAWAL,



MarTech comprises of multiple tech-tool applications under the umbrella of digital

asset management, analytics tools, lead management, CRM, content management

system, social media management and marketing automation. There is a visible

shift towards increased application of data analytics and predictive intelligence for

charting customer journey. With the advancements in the fields of AI and ML and

their integration into sales tools there is an added impetus to the entire sales

process. No wonder then investment in these smart software for marketing activities

is on an upward trajectory and has triggered the genesis of MarTech era.

As per a research, Enterprise marketeers are spending 22% of their budget on

MarTech plans.5 The shift can be attributed to the rise of decision sciences. Today,

any decision-making which earlier used to depend a lot on past patterns, gut

instincts or traditional market surveys, has now become an informed act depending

upon big data analytics and other business intelligence tools.

©Denave2018

ADVENT OF THE MARTECH ERA


Brands have more data about consumers than ever before. They are collecting

it from a growing number of digital channels – including social and mobile

applications. And not only are brands collecting channel data, they are also

starting to collect network and device data. Collecting data streams allows

brands to understand how consumers are interacting with networks and devices

that they can combine with traditional consumer data - demographic, and

sociographic to improve marketing efforts. The concept of a customer data hub

– a place to store all different types of data – whether it’s primary data from

leads/sales, secondary data from partners, third-party data, or indirect data

about a customer from elsewhere in the organization– helps brands understand

that customer experience makes the sale, not just product or price.

LLOYD MATHIAS,

Angel Investor & Former APAC Marketing Head, HP Inc

The phenomenon of integration of sales and marketing has made MarTech, more

encompassing and comprehensive. Now, peeking into the customer journey,

right from noticing the product/service to developing an interest to engaging

and then eventually buying or discarding the deal has become an insightful affair.

With MarTech gaining momentum, quite naturally, the whole dynamics of

customer acquisition has undergone a major revamp. Even the marketeer’s role

has evolved in a big way and they are now extensively leveraging the

advancements in strategizing and executing their campaigns. In the process, the

whole function and process has become much more cost-effective, informed,

shorter and impactful.

ADVENT OF THE MARTECH ERA

MarTech Platforms are a plenty today. What is however underlying these

platforms is a layer of customer data and meta-data that must be worked on, at

a constant basis and be available with a certain degree of accuracy. Setting up a

process of building and enriching data is very critical for us and we spent the last

couple of years in trying to set that up. Now it is showing us results when we apply

our MarTech on top of our data layer, with good outcomes.

SRIRAM GOPALASWAMY,



We asked the experts if they foresee an increase in MarTech spends

in their respective organisations in the coming years. And here’s

what they had to say.

WILL THE SPEND INCREASE?

MarTech investments will increase in all consumer organisation

especially those which service the consumers directly. The

investments will be at multiple levels – front end to not only provide

better & personalised experiences but also collect better customer

data; at back end to mine consumer insights and devise campaigns.

Digital, social, e-commerce, omni-channel etc will also require

higher investment in technology.

UMMED SINGH,

Head – Marketing, ITC Limited

(Lifestyle Retail Business Division)

Yes, we do see and increase as technology evolutions offers

different kinds of possibilities for brand building as well as

revenue generation. Digital and advertising are going to

continue to rule for the years to come.

RUCHIN KHANDUJA,

Senior GM – Marketing, HSIL Ltd.


We spent the last couple of years in trying to set that up the process

of building and enriching data which is crucial for MarTech

platforms. Now it is showing us results when we apply our MarTech

on top of our data layer, with good outcomes. I forsee an increase in

MarTech spends by close to 20% year-on-year as we start engaging

with higher level tech to read the customer decision journeys.

SRIRAM GOPALASWAMY,


I foresee an increase in the MarTech budget spend over the

next five years, as the technology will help drive the

campaigns – right from selecting to execution to feedback

and creating continued traction with the target audience.

NAMIT AGRAWAL,



We asked the experts if they foresee an increase in MarTech spends

in their respective organisations in the coming years. And here’s

what they had to say.

WILL THE SPEND INCREASE?

With the integration of technology into the cocktail of the dynamic duo of sales

and marketing, i.e. the birth of the revenue team – a team with one voice and one

goal, how far have we reached exactly? Despite being a reality, the scale of growth

of this trend can still be seen as a mix of hype and fact.

Multiple organisations still believe it’s a far-flung concept and too ideal for the

actual landscape but more than umpteen success stories from brands across the

world have proven the belief to be a self-pushing fad. Technology will continue to

play the role of closely aligning Marketing and Sales function rendering effortless

flow of leads from Marketing to Sales. A study reported failure to align sales and

marketing teams around the right processes and technologies costs B2B

companies 10% or more of revenue per year ($100 million for a billion-dollar

company).6 Further, lack of alignment leads to the waste of 60-70% of B2B content

and a failure to convert 79% of marketing leads into sales.1

©Denave2018

FINAL WORDS


Change management is tough for any company to plan and span out, however

mandatory it may be. But, something being tough cannot be translated into

something being impossible at the end of the day. And that’s the reason, it is apt to

say, the trend is here to stay and can be expected to amplify and broaden its reach –

all for one simple reason, it makes the organisation meet and exceed its eventual

goal – fulfilment of RoIs and enhancement of revenues.

©Denave2018

FINAL WORDS


A complete integration may seem unattainable however therein lies the future. A

trusted sales enablement partner can help ease the burden and facilitate a seamless

journey towards this integrated future.

An expert sales enablement partner enhances the productivity of sales and

marketing teams, eliminates the bottle necks, plugs the existent gaps, accelerates

the sales cycle and powers the whole revenue engine. Let a perfect partner to assist

you in this trek of ‘One Team – One Vision’.

©Denave2018

AN ENABLING EXPERT


1. https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/the-insider/24-08-16-5-simple-ways-to-achieve-marketing-sales-alignment

2. https://www.luminate.digital/blog/sales-and-marketing-strategies-and-how-they-can-work-together

3. https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/integrated-sales-and-marketing-5-reasons-why-integration-is-valuable

4. https://www.demandgenreport.com/features/industry-insights/study-communication-is-greatest-challenge-for-sales-and-marketing-alignment

5. https://chiefmartec.com/2017/11/enterprise-marketers-spending-22-budget-martech/

6. https://marketeer.kapost.com/sales-marketing-alignment-stats/

SOURCES


For more sales insights, visit

www.denave.com/resources

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Marketing & Sales Integration€¦ · Marketing has progressed from a mass-approach to a personalized approach. It is now putting in efforts into converting its campaign audience