Do you know where sales and Marketing leaders are aligned?
Both leaders of those departments think that the misalignment between those two GTM functions is a priority.
Since the SaaS model emerged, we have kept hearing this: “Sales and marketing misalignment is an obstacle to performance.”
We’re in 2023, and nothing has changed.
This is a surprising topic, as both teams should be focused on generating revenue. Period.
In reality, multiple sources of trust, disparate data, and pressure to reach vanity metrics have fractured these two essential teams.
This misalignment impacts the customer experience, as reported by Salesforce on their State of Sales 4th edition.
When disconnected processes exist inside the sales organization or the
company at large, customers can sense it. Customer-facing teams operating in
silos can lead to jarring experiences, with impersonal or conflicting
communications and time-consuming barriers to getting things done.
Businesses that thrive today are the ones putting the customer experience at the center of the company strategy.
Why should you try to reconcile Sales and Marketing?
Well, Hubspot 2023 study summarizes it for us
In this downturn, who can pretend not to need more efficiency and revenue?
While at Spendesk, I worked as a bridge between Sales and Marketing. And we've been able to identify that:
-
60% of won customers are influenced by at least one marketing touchpoint before converting into an opportunity
- 41% of opportunities are having an awareness of Spendesk from a first marketing touchpoint -
Marketing touchpoints significantly increase the probability of winning customers
- 39% of opportunities with a Marketing first touch are converted to customers.
- 34% of outbound opportunities have also been engaged with Marketing during their prospect journey -
On the contrary, full Sales prospect journeys only have 23% of chance to convert to customers.
- Indeed, according to Forrester, 85% of sales interactions fail to meet the buyer's expectations.
So I can confirm that those two teams should be working together. Even when elaborating on the prospecting journey, I always have been convinced by the allbound way.
Centralize your business around a single source of trust#
The existing company landscape today features multiple sources of trust, depending on the department you belong to.
In most SaaS, you will have the following configuration: Sales guys would use Salesforce as their source of trust, Marketing folks would use Hubspot, and the product team would use another tool like Mixpanel or Amplitude.
This can only lead to different business definitions and eternal sterile debate about who is right.
That’s where having a unified system of records for all GTM functions makes sense. And who is best suited to answer this need?
Cloud Data warehouses.
Let me explain my thoughts further here.
The time of last touch attribution is over.
One of the most common reasons marketing and sales are out of sync is that the customer journey is too segmented between teams.
CDW unified data from all existing data sources, including product, sales, and marketing ones. We need to centralize the business around a single source of trust that could consider every touchpoint of the customer journey and foster a custom attribution model.
By using a data warehouse, you can better track and analyze the interactions of multiple stakeholders over a prolonged period, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey. That is mandatory in the B2B world.
This is the purpose of B2B attribution, a space where DreamData is leading the off-the-shelf platform movement.
The modern data stack can be used for all main business needs: Reporting, Customer campaigns orchestration, Ops processes, and custom attribution.)
Indeed, a tracking tool like Snowplow will allow you to replace Google Analytics and tie any event you want to track to a specific business entity (account or individual). All this event data can be pushed into a data warehouse like BigQuery or Snowflake and leveraged by your go-to-market teams.
Since all your touchpoints and other relevant data points already exist in your data warehouse, you can go wild and build your custom attribution model.
Still, it is not for everyone, as first, you need to have the key components of a modern data stack, which are An ETL, a data warehouse, and a modeling layer like DBT. Then to engage the data, you’ll use Cargo.
Such Stack requires a team of data engineers, but the rewards are numerous. Most established companies use the modern data stack to power their operations and go-to-market strategies.
This shift toward data warehouse-centric businesses has been originally started by business intelligence tools like Metabase or Looker that sit directly on top of your CDW. Now, with Cargo, we enable business folks to operationalize the data by also sitting on top of where your data lives.
Sales and marketing misalignment is by no means an easy fix.
The first step towards bringing sales and marketing together is establishing one source of truth regarding contact, company, product, and transactional data.Using a standard reference will ensure that internal teams speak the same language and that revenue teams have shared definitions and metrics.
Christian Kleinerman, Senior Vice President of Product at Snowflake, said, “Unistore (i.e., The ability to build apps on top of Snowflake) is ushering in a renaissance of building and deploying a new generation of applications in the Data Cloud.”
In the coming years, companies will revolutionize the way they operate by building their various applications and processes on top of a data warehouse.
A new era in which the data warehouse will become the operating system for all data-driven applications streamlining the way businesses make decisions and drive growth.
MaxJan 1, 2024
