Integrate to ignite growth

The conventional sales playbook no longer applies.

Today’s B2B buyers have more complex needs, work in more collaborative environments and can easily access unprecedented depth of information about the products and services they seek to purchase.

Faced with this new reality, many sales teams are unprepared to unlock their organisation’s growth potential. To stay competitive, organisations must transform their sales and marketing operations, dismantling silos to create integrated processes that accelerate growth. They must adopt and share new tools and intelligent technologies to gain accurate insights that allow them to engage buyers at the right moment with the right information.

Understanding a buyer’s journey should matter as much today to a sales engineer as building personal relationships. The era of sales autonomy is over.

Traditional tensions hinder growth

Does this sound familiar? Sales teams complain the marketing leads they get often lead to a dead end. 43% of salespeople say they need higher quality leads from their marketing teams.[1]

Meanwhile, some marketing professionals believe their efforts to generate demand are wasted by sales teams failing to convert qualified opportunities into orders. 76% of marketing teams say aligning with sales was a major concern.[2]

This locking of horns is symptomatic of a traditional sales and marketing strategy, stuck in silos. It’s a disjointed approach that cannot meet the fluid challenges of today’s complex B2B buying processes.

39% of sales professionals say that what they most need is alignment with their marketing teams on goals and strategyHubSpot’s 2024 State of Sales Report

Buyers are suffering from information overload

The relentless rise of content marketing across the B2B landscape has empowered buyers with a wealth of high-quality information to inform their decision-making. This has enabled B2B buyers to spend substantial time and effort researching ways to solve their issues. Typically, B2B buyers are using digital channels to take them more than halfway through their purchasing process before they contact or even welcome in-person engagement with a salesperson. Gartner, for example, found that 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience.[3]

You can have too much of a good thing though. Buyers can find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available online. Those who made a digital self-service purchase are 1.65 times more likely to regret a purchase than traditional, rep-led buyers.[4]

The involvement of several different functions in the buying process further complicates matters. The average enterprise buying group comprises up to 11 stakeholders spanning five distinct business functions.[5] Furthermore, it is common for B2B buyers to revisit many of the purchasing criteria during the buying process, with different players popping up along the journey.

Focus on simplifying the purchasing process

Only sales and marketing functions that are tightly integrated will be best placed to help customers navigate increasingly convoluted B2B purchasing processes. Sales teams operating in isolation cannot take advantage of all their organisation’s resources, limiting their effectiveness. Marketing teams that focus on meeting their targets for qualified leads will not be incentivised to share subsequent data that could help achieve a sales breakthrough.

Integrated sales, marketing and customer experience functions can share different insights across all points in the buying cycle. This gives organisations an opportunity to step in at the right time to help their customers make sense of the information they have.

77% of B2B buyers say their latest purchase was very complex or difficultForrester

Tight integration is essential

Integrating the work of sales, marketing, customer experience and data teams must go beyond marketing executives simply spending a day on the road with a salesperson, or a sales manager joining a marketing campaign planning call for an hour.

Mutual goals must be established and insights from multiple sources, data analysis and customer contacts must be shared. This will enable the sales process to be accurately steered through every stage of the buying journey – which buyers to approach, when is the best time for contact, what advice to offer and how to guide them to a purchasing decision they won’t regret.

B2B marketing, sales, and product leaders must establish the connection between buyer value and growth, lead their teams to think differently about value and encourage the development of new behaviours.Srividya Sridharan, VP, Group Director, Forrester

Make sales success a joint goal

The collaborative approach with common targets and performance metrics to drive sales growth can transform an organisation’s relationships with its customers by providing them with more relevant guidance.

For example, coordinated sales and marketing teams will be better placed to deliver consistent messaging. Buyers are 2.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal when they perceive high information consistency between a supplier’s website and its salespeople.[6]

Shared information also helps achieve personalisation at scale. When marketing identifies a buyer downloading content, such as a white paper, from its website, sharing that insight with sales enables more relevant support to be offered. Insights from data analytics teams can also supercharge sales efforts by tracking when buyers access website pages, indicating their areas of interest. Predictive analytics can also identify high-value accounts and forecast sales trends, enhancing strategic planning. That matters because 86% of B2B customers expect organisations to be well informed about their personal information during an interaction.[7]

Timing is crucial too. When sales teams can provide expert advice to customers at the right time, the risk of purchasers later regretting their buying decision is halved compared with self-service digital decision-making.[8]

Highly targeted and well-timed interactions help to deepen trust with customers.Typically, buyers focus on independent information gathering during first 70% of the purchasing journey.[9] Engaging with buyers before this phase is completed may even lessen the chances of winning the deal. Instead of pushing for face-to-face meetings during this research period, sellers are better served by developing their position as a trusted supplier through social gatherings, events, customer references and other educational initiatives. Building trust is vital because more than half (52%) of buyers are more likely to buy from a vendor after accessing its content.[8]

1. ‍Establish joint performance metrics and goals. Often, marketing teams measure success by the number of qualified leads they hand off to sales, as well as measures that include brand awareness, campaign response, click-through rates and others. Sales teams typically use measures that focus on revenue, profit and growth. Integration depends on establishing common metrics, in particular sales-qualified leads (SQLs), with both functions jointly agreeing on how these are defined and scored. Other joint metrics could include cost per opportunity, customer retention and more.‍
2. Set service level agreements (SLAs). SLAs are measurable, documented processes that define how each function supports the other and their responsibilities at each stage of the customer purchasing process. This will help to build mutual trust and plug gaps in processes. Some 85% of marketers with an SLA believe their marketing strategy is effective.[10]‍
3. Ensure regular communication between sales and marketing teams. Sounds obvious yet a third of B2B organisations do not have regular meetings between sales and marketing.[10] Schedule weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings to allow teams to jointly identify and resolve issues, as well as provide insights into successes and areas for improvement.

Several other initiatives will also be needed, ranging from ensuring sales input into content production, developing benchmarks, and aligning the use of CRM and other tools.

The effort will be richly rewarded with benefits being proven by organisations that have embarked on sales and marketing integration projects. For example, one organisation that established business processes to jointly deliver value across the customer journey increased its annual revenue by about 48%, lead volume by 50% and lead acceptance rate by 35%. In another case, an organisation used data insights to create more transparent buying journeys that resulted in its close rate jumping from 20% to 80%.[11]

Today’s B2B buyers want simpler purchasing experiences that help them make decisions they won’t later regret. It’s up to vendors to provide the expertise and insight to help them, yet that won’t be achieved unless their sales and marketing functions run in unison.