The holy grail of the 360 client is still a long way off: companies must react quickly to the many obstacles that stand in their way to cope with the crisis.
Despite years of promises and technological investments to get a 360 view of the customer, companies are failing to deliver on their promise. In question, disconnected marketing and sales departments. Yet 89% want their objectives aligned, which would lead to a 24% growth in their organization according to the latest study conducted by Freshworks with executives from French sales and marketing services. However, these 2 teams are still separate and face siled customer information and a lack of cohesion. However, there are still many obstacles to overcome, and companies must react quickly.
A hierarchy that slows down collaboration between teams
Since the start of the pandemic, sales and marketing teams have not been hit homogeneously: while only 26% of marketing teams have observed a decrease in the ability to attract potential customers (lead acquisition), 45% of sales departments have suffered a decrease in sales in 2020 compared to 2019.
Among the 3 main obstacles identified by the 2 teams, the top priority is the dispersion of information on prospects and customers across multiple sales and marketing systems (43%), followed by the lack of precise data on customers (37%) as well. than poor communication (37%). In addition, there are difficulties in obtaining common reporting for 32% of respondents. These obstacles, once overcome, would allow better collaboration between these two services, but nearly a third of respondents (28%) believe that their hierarchy is slowing down this process.
These issues have a real negative impact on the performance of employees, within companies in which the marketing and sales departments are not very collaborative. Achieving their objectives (35%), obtaining good performance indicators (55%) or establishing strategies (47%) are issues at the center of the concerns of employees, working in companies where “smarketing” is not yet considered a standard.
This is all the more important for companies, which for almost half of them (48%) saw a drop in revenue in 2020 compared to the previous year. It is also necessary to consider that sales and marketing have not been hit in the same way by the pandemic: while only 26% of marketing teams have observed a decrease in the ability to attract potential customers (lead acquisition), 45% of commercial services experienced lower sales in 2020 compared to 2019.
Expectations shared by the sales and marketing teams
To ensure optimal collaboration between departments, sales and marketing teams have specific needs to ensure both the relevance and the performance of their actions.
The lack of visibility on the sales funnel is an expectation shared by 54% of sales teams who would like to have better visibility of the marketing part (such as the number of clicks, visits to the website, interactions with chatbots…) and by 67% of marketing teams.
In addition, personalization is also lacking on each side since more than half of the sales teams would like more information on the competition (52%), more content (52%) and better quality (51%) to share with the prospects. 65% of marketing teams believe sales departments should pay special attention to learning, understanding, and delivering messages consistently to prospects and customers.
“Marketing and sales are no longer the enemy brothers of organizations. Their desire for rapprochement is increasingly strong and has accelerated since the health crisis. If the obstacles are still numerous, it is clear that expectations are converging : put the customer at the center of their actions by focusing on personalization. The time has come for smarketing “
Christopher Wiltberger, Managing Director for Southern Europe at Freshworks.
Methodology : Study carried out by Freshworks with 1,250 sales and marketing executives, including 97 in France.
Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash
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