Aligning Marketing and Sales Pays Off

survey of 160 businesses, on the effects of alignment on KPIs such as revenue growth, client retention and the deals-per-lead ratio.

Laura Nuhaan, parter at Andeta, says that the alignment of Marketing and Sales is a characteristic of companies where the Marketing and Sales departments have common goals, strategies and metrics for measuring success:

Only 25% of the companies we researched have ‘high’ alignment. Clearly, there is a lot of room for businesses to boost their results.

In half of the surveyed companies, there are regular conflicts between Marketing and Sales, according to the report. The management is usually unaware of these conflicts – the C-Suite has a considerably more positive view of the alignment between Marketing and Sales than the departments themselves. Nuhaan: ‘There is a lot to be won by better alignment between the two departments in this respect.’

Organizations that can boast a high level of alignment between marketing and sales are characterized by:

1. Division between brand and product marketing on the one hand, and lead generation and sales support on the other. Currently, only 35% of organizations have such a division of tasks.
2. Job rotation and creating opportunities for cooperation. Only 26% of organizations use a similar system at the moment.
3. Analysis of sales data by Marketing in order to optimize future campaigns. Only 39% of the businesses surveyed does this currently.
4. Using technology to support marketing and sales. Organizations with a higher revenue growth, higher client retention and high deals-per-lead ratio often use CRM and Marketing Automation software. 29% of the companies that took part in the survey did not use marketing automation of any kind.

Finally, a striking result from the report is that technology to support Marketing and Sales is not widely accepted and used in the Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg): 36% of respondents from this are indicated they did not use technology of any kind to support Marketing and Sales, versus only 9% of the total body of respondents. Marketing Automation technology is even less adopted at the moment: just 6% of respondents indicated they use this kind of technology.

You can find the full research report (in Dutch) here. . .