Most CMOs not very confident in their sales and marketing models

Entitled ‘Sales & Marketing: Driving Revenue Through Collaboration’, the study examines the marketing and sales relationship and how it should evolve. 

The researchers found that the ability to share customers insights with the sales team to inform the pipeline is one of the defining traits of the new sales-marketing relationship. The data is gathered by data science, as well as AI and machine learning.

Key findings include:

• 70% of marketers don’t feel very confident in their current sales and marketing model to sell effectively in the digitalised customer journey.
• 60% say marketing and sales don’t co-own customer strategy and data.
• 61% of marketers say fragmented technology across marketing, sales and service restrains better sales-marketing alignment.

“Sales and marketing will have to redefine their relationship to enable new customer-centric purchasing paths. This requires an entirely new way to collaborate across customer strategy and data, initiatives, technology, activities and metrics,” said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council.

The study suggests CMOs should adopt four sales-marketing alignment initiatives to better support the digitalised customer journey and self-reliant buyer:

• Collaborate to achieve business objectives (e.g., revenue, customer acquisition, market share).
• Collaborate on marketing and sales campaigns that drive lead generation.
• Define shared KPIs for marketing and sales.
• Align on customer personas.

“To sell effectively to the new self-reliant digital buyer and enable the purchasing paths customers seek, marketing and sales teams need to have the same goals, speak the same language, and hold each other accountable,” said Jason Galloway, Customer Advisory Lead and Marketing Consulting Practice Lead at KPMG LLP.

The report is based on a survey of over 300 marketing leaders across industries and geographies. You can download the report here.