Do you feel like your marketing and sales teams are doing their own thing even though they’re supposed to be on the same page? Most salespeople admit that spending valuable time chasing what turns out to be a lousy lead feels like a punch in the gut and slaps down your company’s chances at revenue growth.
But there are two easy solutions: technology and collaboration.
In a 2020 LinkedIn survey, 87 percent of sales and marketing leaders reported that dedicated collaboration between sales and marketing enables critical business growth. But as most recovering RevOps dropouts will tell you, you can’t make changes until you recognize you have a problem.
Business growth and alignment depend on synchronized efforts from both sales and marketing teams. If your metrics are a tad disappointing, let’s explore four telltale signs that your sales and marketing teams might be out of sync when it comes to goals.
1. One team is meeting its KPIs while the other team is tanking.
Achieving revenue targets becomes challenging when there is a lack of synergy between sales and marketing. When these two crucial departments operate in silos or fail to collaborate effectively, it wastes valuable time and money while also exposing a disjointed customer experience.
“The sales team has invaluable firsthand information on your clients’ pain points and can share their experiences of what has worked to close deals in the past,” says marketing expert and blogger Sam Meza. “The marketing team provides insights on how to best convey and organize that information to make it as compelling as possible. Together, you will be able to produce stronger, more relevant content that can be used both to market your company as well as to close deals.”
When these two departments collaborate on shared KPIs, it ensures a unified focus on common goals, fostering better alignment between lead generation and conversion efforts.
2. Teams are using different systems to track customers’ data.
It’s surprisingly common to encounter companies where one department uses an automated RevOps system while the rest of the company relies on a specialized yet siloed system to track customer data. These companies don’t realize the negative impact this can have on a company’s revenue-generating potential.
“The research is clear,” says Emily He, CVP, business applications and platform at Microsoft. “Employees want more personalized productivity solutions and assistance from technology to automate manual processes and reports that feel like busy work.” As she goes on to explain, survey research from HBR reveals some interesting statistics:
- Almost 60 percent of surveyed employees reported their collaborative tools don’t align with how their teams handle workload.
- Sixty-four percent showed concerns that data-driven tools don’t integrate with existing RevOps processes.
- Seventy-two percent of employees surveyed want their collaboration tools to be compatible to simplify work among teams.
In addition to these statistics, HBR research also found that at least seven in 10 people blame bad data, limited data access, and teams using siloed software that collects different data sets as key challenges their companies need to address.
3. The sales team doesn’t utilize marketing collateral.
Marketing collateral—such as brochures, presentations, and case studies—is meticulously crafted to convey key messages and highlight the value propositions of a product or service. When sales teams neglect or underutilize these materials, they miss out on a valuable toolset designed to support their efforts in engaging and persuading potential customers.
Our experience with clients has found that this often leads to inconsistent messaging, loss of brand coherence, and missed opportunities for effective communication. Moreover, the absence of marketing collateral in sales interactions may result in a lack of credibility and reduced impact, as these materials are often designed to address common customer concerns and showcase the expertise and credibility of the organization.
Overall, the neglect of marketing collateral by sales teams can undermine the cohesion of marketing strategies, hinder the conveyance of key selling points, and ultimately impede the conversion of leads into customers.
4. RevOps lack comprehensive analytics.
Research shows that 86 percent of employees want solutions that make information (like documents, business data, and customer records) more accessible for their departments.
By centralizing data, both teams can access real-time insights, customer behavior patterns, and engagement metrics, fostering better collaboration and informed decision-making. A shared RevOps platform streamlines processes, eliminates data silos, and enhances communication, enabling sales teams to leverage marketing insights and vice versa.
“Companies spend billions each year cobbling sales and marketing tools together into jimmy-rigged go-to-market tech stacks that don’t really work,” says Kent Madsen, Fullcast cofounder and managing partner of Epic Ventures. “Fullcast is an excellent go-to-market sales platform that integrates both planning and execution functions of the sales motion, giving us confidence it has an unlimited ceiling for immediate and long-term growth in this space.”
This synergy ensures a cohesive approach to customer engagement, aligns strategies, and optimizes resource allocation. Ultimately, a central RevOps platform empowers organizations to achieve greater efficiency, transparency, and overall success by breaking down departmental barriers and creating a unified ecosystem for data-driven collaboration between sales and marketing teams.
The synergy between sales and marketing is a necessity. Achieving that perfect alignment isn’t just about chasing a buzzword: It’s about instituting meaningful strategies that help a business unlock its full potential. Recognizing the signs of misalignment is the first step toward meaningful change.
With Fullcast, we can help you fine-tune those strategies, bridge the gaps, and ensure that your sales and marketing teams are dancing in perfect harmony toward shared goals.
