According to a sales effectiveness and content marketing study, about half of sales reps and more than 30% of sales managers do not understand their own brand’s B2B content marketing strategy. This disconnect leads to the divide between these two integral parts of a business.
Marketing and sales are often at odds in most businesses. It is not because they have different goals, but because there is often an overlap between these two teams. It is difficult to determine where one stops and the other begins.
To be able to work together, there needs to be a clear distinction between marketing and sales. If you can’t pinpoint that in your overall business strategy, it’s easy for one team to step on the other’s toes.
And that’s just the beginning of it. There are so many aspects wherein the two team gets disconnected. Without addressing these points and bridging the disconnect, marketing and sales teams won’t be able to work together seamlessly. So before anything else, let us look at some of the reasons why these two teams don’t often see eye-to-eye.
Why B2B Sales and Marketing Don’t Always Work Together
In most cases, the Marketing team is not appreciated by Sales, and Sales doesn’t know how Marketing can help them. They usually work separately, preventing businesses from making the most out of these teams. This is due to several factors, which we’ll discuss one by one in detail below.
1. Different Roles
In any B2B company, we can summarize the roles of marketing and sales into the following:
- Marketing is in charge of attracting potential customers to the business
- Sales is responsible for closing deals to create paying customers
Basically, marketing is the first step to get potential leads interested, then sales take that interest and nurture it. Understanding the basic relationship between these two teams is one of the best strategies to help them work together. By defining each team's job, the company can focus on the customer buying process. Then, assign specific tasks to each team to ensure that they don’t overlap.
The tasks performed by each department vary, but here are some of the common roles you can start with.
B2B Marketing
- Content marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- PPC
- Social media marketing
- Calls to action
B2B Sales
- Speaking to the decision-maker
- Performing client’s research
- Knowing the competition
The point of division between these two teams is when a potential lead contacts your business. Before that point, your marketing team is in charge. After that, your sales department handles the wrap-up.
With this clear and segmented setup, your marketing and sales teams' roles will be able to work together like never before.
2. Different Goals
Another reason for the divide between these two teams is their goals. You’ll notice that the objectives of marketing versus sales are slightly different.
The Sales team is focused on earning conversions. Your sales reps work hard to nurture prospects towards becoming paying customers.
Though marketing also improves sales, its main goal revolves around promoting the brand or company, including its products or services. This is done by communicating the company’s value, which does help the company earn sales by establishing brand trust.
Since each team has different goals, they tend to measure different metrics, which leads us to the third point.
3. Different Metrics
When it comes to measuring success and monitoring analytics, these two teams look at different numbers. Marketing tracks numbers like impressions, reads, total visits, page views, website traffic, subscriber growth rate, and others. On the other hand, Sales typically focus on conversion.
Marketing analytics don’t directly help in converting leads to customers. While it provides an overview of how the company is doing in terms of brand awareness and customer reach, these numbers don’t really convert prospects.
In order to work together, marketing should adjust its analytics and provide sales with rich information that could help move customers down the sales funnel. Several third-party tools help provide a different reporting angle to connect marketing with sales.
For example, some lead generation tools provide marketers with more information about the website visitors. Instead of just looking at the overall traffic, Marketing will know who visited the website, along with their company contact information, which they can use to define the customer journey. With this information, Sales can directly contact these qualified leads.
4. Different Channels or Platforms
Traditionally, B2B sales are made by building relationships with prospects via trade shows, conventions, and conferences. Aside from these promotional events, the sales team also conducts one-on-one meetings and networking to convert customers.
Due to the pandemic, all these opportunities to network and meet with potential customers have been reduced to online conferences and demos. Hence, companies need to provide a platform that the sales team can use to make up for these lost opportunities. This platform needs to have rich content, an intelligent catalog search, and self-service features that would allow Marketing and Sales to work together.
Marketing needs to embrace these new e-commerce capabilities in order to become a powerful partner for Sales to help customer acquisition, service, and retention.
Bridging the B2B Sales-Marketing Gap with Zobrist
Aligning B2B sales and marketing is not enough to cut it in this competitive industry. Instead, companies need to integrate the sales and marketing teams to share data that would generate revenue in a unified manner. Zobrist provides businesses the tools to help achieve that.
Zobrist provides e-commerce visual merchandising and enterprise eCommerce features that save businesses from cost overruns, delays, and unexpected new requirements. The company also empowers both teams by providing e-commerce capabilities that allow them to reach new buyers, streamline the ordering process, facilitate digital transformation, and improve customer experience.
Find out how you can build powerful e-commerce experiences by scheduling a demo today.
