The product manager—a bright, young, and refreshingly candid voice in the martech world—shared an observation, gained from many formal and informal discussions with senior executives across the world, that was not surprising and yet still shocking. Despite decades of so-called “lessons learned,” and the explosion of sophisticated sales and marketing technologies, the fundamental rift between sales and marketing teams remains stubbornly in place at all too many big and small companies.

The arguments are eerily familiar to anyone who’s been in B2B long enough:

• Marketing complains that sales doesn’t convert the leads they’ve worked so hard to generate.
• Sales counters that marketing doesn’t deliver enough high-quality leads worth pursuing.

These debates were raging decades ago. They’re still raging today.

The truth—then and now—is that neither side is entirely right or wrong. The real issue is that too many organisations treat sales and marketing as separate, even competing, functions rather than two halves of the same revenue engine.

As my new friend in martech product management highlighted, no ABM platform, no AI-powered targeting tool, no shiny piece of martech will magically bridge this divide. Technology can enable better alignment, but it can’t create it.

What’s required is genuine, consistent collaboration—not just between department heads, but all the way down to the front lines. That means:

• Talking regularly—not just at quarterly reviews, but in weekly syncs and shared planning sessions. Most do this, but few do it well.
• Agreeing on common goals—clear revenue targets, shared definitions of a qualified lead, and mutual accountability for results. Common goals are, of course, common sense, but this remains a scarce commodity.
• Embracing one unified scoreboard—so that both sales and marketing are working to the same numbers, in real time, without the selective reporting that fuels mistrust. Separate reporting and tracking processes and systems are almost guaranteed to generate friction.

Genuine collaboration is simple in concept, hard in practice, and absolutely essential. The most advanced ABM platform in the world—contact-level or otherwise—will fail in an environment where sales and marketing remain siloed. But when the two teams align on purpose, process, and performance measurement, technology becomes a force multiplier rather than a false promise.

If you’re investing in ABM, don’t just evaluate the tool. Evaluate your organisation’s willingness to collaborate—because without that fundamental commitment, you’re just buying another piece of tech for the shelf.

Unfortunately, just 28% of respondents reported having achieved their objectives in the current survey. That’s not good enough. The case for incremental improvement has never been weaker than it is today with the pandemic disrupting our business world forever. Those that not only survive but thrive will be orchestrating leaps forward in the coming months and years, with marketing in the lead.

Thanks to the pandemic we are all moving rapidly to a digital world, where business, especially business-to-business activity, happens wherever people are.

Businesses who did not have their digital platform acts together were especially vulnerable during the pandemic-stricken 2020. They struggled to facilitate online commerce efficiently and with the ease. Their vision,  leadership, data, people, process and system silos and deficiencies were exposed by the transparent front door that is their web presence.

Critically, today’s B2B customers know what good looks like thanks to their own personal commerce experiences with the leading B2C brands. In 2021 all B2B players, must fast forward their digitisation ambitions with their marketers playing decisive roles. 

Today, no matter what industry you are in, it’s not enough to simply promote your brand and make, market and sell a product or service. You need a digital community marketplace. An integrated, self-service, collaboration environment (web + commerce + marketing automation + CRM + analytics and ERP) where you customers interact, buy (ideally, subscribe), share, engage and learn from one another. 

In this transformational climate, now, more than ever, we marketers must step up and lead. Marketers have to exercise genuine customer-focused influence and advocacy both horizontally and vertically across their organisations.

It means, for example, embracing service, supply chain and transaction management as the new marketing. There is little value in assembling and advertising blue sky brand promises if your supply chain is not close to best in class, if your customer service team is an island and your ERP landscape is a patchwork of dinosaur legacy systems with 20th century DNA. 

The Green Hat report highlights, the despite progress on many fronts, marketing must speed up.

In contrast, the best technologists are re-engineering and collaborating to co-create genuine digital businesses, not just “serve the business”.

As digital disruption accelerates, the division between front and back offices is blurring. Traditional back-office apps are migrating, one vendor at a time, to be closer to the sales-and-marketing, customer experience driven front end. The agility imperative means back and front office must integrate and synchronize

Digital technologies are transforming CRM. Tighter integration means CRM is extending from sales, service, and marketing into commerce. The long-term focus is not simply on selling products and services, but on delivering authentic brands and experiences, from campaigns to customer journeys to commerce.

Best-in-class B2B marketers are doubling down on marketing automation and performance metrics, according to the 2016 B2B Marketing Outlook Survey conducted by the leading digital marketing agency Green Hat and developed in conjunction with ADMA (Association for Data-Driven Marketing & Advertising).

Overall, budgets are on the rise. Of the 448 participants, 40% said their dollars are moving up. In comparison, 9% said their numbers were heading south.

However, the perennial problem of lead follow-up remains, with only 36% stating that their marketing-sourced leads were being effectively followed up their sales organisations.

I joined ADMA CEO Jodie Sangster, Telstra Wholesale’s Marketing GM Glenn Flower and Green Hat’s CEO Andrew Hausegger for an engaging discussion on the survey’s results:

Watch the Webinar Recording

The data has been drawn from the company’s 2015 B2B Marketing Outlook report:

• Marketers are allocating on average 28% of their budgets to digital
• 75% will spend more or the same on inbound compared with outbound
• 38% are satisfied with their marketing automation investments
• 75% say content marketing is a significant/very significant component of their strategy
• 52% are not getting satisfactory lead follow up from the their sales teams
• 20% are getting some form of social media ROI
• And, no surprise, marketing ROI is the number one challenge

A recent research study by InsideSales.com shows that the average response times to website leads sits at 40 hours and 56 minutes

And though some companies are doing better than before, it is at the expense of their  slower competitors.

Too few companies appear to act on the reality that there is a direct correlation between lead response times and lead close rates.

Unfortunately, whilst the need for speed is widely acknowledged, few are geared to react in the almost instant –on timeframe.

What’s the value in a web presence if you are not equipped to engage with those who do visit your site and request contact?

This year’s Insidesales.com report involved 5257 companies.

Their sites were visited by “secret shoppers” who located a web form and asked for follow up in some form.

The clock then started ticking as Inside Sales counted down how long it would take for responses to flow and how were they managed:

• 1811 (34%) companies were eliminated from further analysis because they did not have a website which contained a functioning Web form.
• 3446 companies received a Web form submission.
• 1368 companies (40%) did not respond to the lead we submitted.
• The average response time by phone was 40 hours and 56 minutes.
• The median response time by phone was 4 hours and 8 minutes.

The average response times have not improved since the first year this research was conducted in 2008 and time of 44 hours, 31 minutes and 8 second was recorded.

1368 companies of the 3446 in the study did not make a single phone call to follow up on people coming to their website and asking for contact.

214 companies made 6 or more phone calls to follow up on web-based inquiries.

The report also found that 65 percent of companies make their initial response through email.

The remaining 35 percent use phone calls to respond — 23 percent called and left a voicemail, and 12 percent called and did not leave a voicemail.

Investment firm Jordan Edmiston Group (JEGI) has recently released what they call a Sector Insight Brief into the developing EMM application stack, which can be described as a technology infrastructure that supports a synchronized approach to marketing strategy, development, delivery, and measurement, across the marketing mix.

“Demand is strong, and budgets are sizable, for a new class of digital marketing services required to build and maintain the stack,” the JEGI brief states.

“These services actually look more like technology consulting and IT services.  The outlook for growth in this new services category is attracting new providers to the market and is driving continued growth in the stack and a vibrant M&A market.”

Between 2010-2012, four companies (“The Big Four”) have invested over $20 billion in marketing technology M&A: Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce.

Here’s how JEGI pictures the developing stack:

Not sure about all the acronyms? Here’s the EMM lexicon: BI (Business Intelligence), CEM (Customer Experience Management), MCM (Marketing Content Management), WCM (Website Content Management), DAM (Digital Asset Management) and MAM (Marketing Asset Management.

How’s your stack shaping up? Are your vendors and professional services partners up to it? Does your own team have the necessary skills and appetite to engage? And top management?

As Forrester Research’s Robert Brosnan said in a 2012 report, “marketing today is impossible without significant investments in technology”.