How Will Marketing Automation Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment?

Although the relationship between sales and marketing is usually healthy and fruitful, it can – at times – be siloed and misaligned.

If your dream is to reinvent the relationship for the better, both departments need to embrace technology to build a single, aligned sales and marketing function – as CleverTouch found out in the State of Marketing Automation Adoption and Usage Report.

The report collated feedback from over 200 CMO’s and Marketing Directors across the UK, USA and EMEA to uncover how MarTech has impacted their business, and specifically:

How has investing in marketing automation improved sales and marketing collaboration?

When asked how Marketing Automation had improved sales and marketing alignment, the top 4 results were:

Increased accountability between departments

Sales say the leads aren’t good enough, marketing say sales aren’t following up and both say they lack insight into what the other is doing – and round and round it goes…

Whilst there will always be tension between the two, over 51% of senior marketers agree that implementing Marketing Automation gave them greater insight into what the other department was doing, and with it, the accountability of what each team needs to deliver.

“50% of enterprise businesses say increased accountability was the driver behind better sales and marketing collaboration.”

Quicker lead routing

When you have a larger sales team, especially when it comes to field or multi-centre teams, leads can be lost in transition, routed to more than one person, or delayed in their follow-up.

Yet with Marketing Automation in place, 47% of senior marketers agree that lead routing was faster and more accurate. Whilst it can take time to move from a manual to automated process, you have the mechanisms in place to reduce response times, improve engagement and streamline the entire lead management process.

Helped establish a common sales funnel

Let’s put it this way, if you don’t have a sales funnel in place, what process do you use to manage, report-on, and hand-off prospect activity? How do you know when something has converted and what the source was?

Marketing Automation is a crucial part in building this funnel, and 46% of senior marketers agree that establishing the process has brought sales and marketing closer together. Not only will it bring clearly defined roles and processes, it helps to build a streamlined customer experience from the first point of contact through to closing the sale.

Provide greater prospect intelligence

Much of the tension between sales and marketing is the result of two things – incomplete information being shared between departments or a failing/ non-existent attribution model.

46% of senior marketers agreed that MA provides greater insight and intelligence on prospects, and as a result, brings sales and marketing in closer alignment. Whilst it may seem obvious, Marketing Automation makes marketing smarter. It means you can provide sales intelligence at scale, identify buying signals with relative ease and build a truly data-driven marketing function.

These insights, and more, are available in the State of Marketing Automation Adoption & Usage Report. Download your report now.