A new study reveals which issues create internal friction between sales and marketing.
82% of sales and marketing professionals working in the B2B space find the experience provided to their customers to be worse than excellent.
The main drivers behind this are communication issues like differing or misaligned goals (41%), complex processes or workflows (36%), and frustration between departments (29%).
This misalignment might be illustrated by the fact that as their top concerns in the year ahead marketing wants more leads (52%) while sales wants better leads (45%).
What does sales mostly complain about regarding the marketing team?
The top complaints are targeting the wrong leads (43%), underperforming tools or systems creating extra tasks (32%), insufficient or inaccurate data (25%), and lack of willingness to collaborate (25%).
Sales professionals feeling that marketing is targeting the wrong leads might indicate the belief that marketing campaigns and strategy are a mystery, instead of being worked out in an open and collaborative process.
Also, 74% of survey respondents agree that their tools cause misalignment between marketing and sales. This creates a need for improvement and, in fact, consolidating technology has second place (after improving workflows) on the list of digital transformation initiatives in the coming year.
What are the top complaints from marketing about sales?
Marketers complain mainly about insufficient or inaccurate data (40%), not following up on leads (38%), and underperforming tools creating complexity and workarounds (33%) on the part of the sales teams.
To be able to fix problems like insufficient or inaccurate data the key is to have a single source of data. The overwhelming majority of respondents (86%) agree that lacking a single source of data prevents a company from understanding the customer journey.
The above findings were sourced from a survey report titled “State of Marketing and Sales Alignment 2022” published by SharpSpring and Ascend2.
