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.

The YouTube channel Connecting the Dots reports that CARIAD was intended to future-proof the VW Group, but, so far, it has been an expensive disaster handicapped by institutional resistance.

In 2020 former CEO Herbert Diess established CARIAD with a significant budget, army of coders and a mandate to make VW Germany’s biggest tech company after SAP, with the software engineering smarts to digitize the core vehicle business and catch up to Tesla and the leading Chinese auto firms.

On October 14 2021 Diess even had Elon Musk appear as a “surprise guest” in an attempt to energise 200 of his most senior executives at a VW conference in Austria.

However, VW’s rigid culture and myriad internal divisions resulted in disappointing progress, duplicative efforts, financial losses, delayed vehicle launches and corporate embarrassment.

In large part because of CARIAD’s failures, Diess was exited by the VW Board in August 2022 . Porsche CEO Oliver Blume then had his remit extended to the entire group.

Blume claims to be committed to turning around CARIAD’s fortunes, refactoring the organisation’s objectives with fewer people and resources. Progress has reportedly been made, but the technical and financial challenges remain imposing.

In the Connecting the Dots YouTube video, a standout comment, from my personal perspective, is the remark by an anonymous CARIAD staffer that work-life balance was an excellent and that “weekends start at 11am on Fridays”.

However, it was also acknowledged that this is “not how you win” against Tesla and the Chinese competitors.

This was also my experience of German corporate culture during four years at Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz HQ in Stuttgart. The quickest way to make oneself unpopular was to schedule a Friday afternoon meeting.

Walker has released a follow-up to their 2013 report Customers 2020, called  Customers 2020: A Progress Report, which endeavors to answer three questions:

• What customer expectations and trends are still relevant as 2020 approaches?
• What should B-to-B firms do today to ensure they’re able to win and keep customers in 2020 and beyond?
• What are the implications for CX professionals?

Walker says “interactions at every stage of the journey are becoming more complex, presents a striking conundrum for today’s B-to-B firms”.

The winners are focused on personalization, ease, and speed. According to Walker, these companies have fundamentally changed how they think, act, and collaborate.

Here is how Walker defines the three imperatives:

PERSONALIZATION:
There is no average customer. Customers want to do business with companies that know their individual and company needs and are willing to tailor the experience to meet those needs.
EASE:
An explosion of information, connected networks, and more competitive options lead to little patience for complexity. Customers don’t have time on their side and place a real premium on simplicity.
SPEED:
The pace of business is accelerating rapidly. Time is of the essence. Customers can’t afford to wait around while their business issues are being considered. They value companies that provide real-time response and proactively anticipate their future needs.

Planning, publishing, distributing and measuring content are collective, connected challenges that modern marketing teams must master.

The proliferation of channels represents a massive burden for marketers. They cannot be effectively serviced manually by expecting marketers to engage in heroic efforts, with the aid of Excel.

Gartner says that “by 2020, 90% of brands will practice at least one form of marketing personalization. However, content — not data — will be the bottleneck and primary cause of failure”.

And Gartner also says that by 2021, the term “content marketing will be defunct as all marketing content rises to high-quality expectations of attention-limited audiences”.

“The aim is to unite and focus buyer engagement through valuable content, delivered across thousands of assets and channels where it expresses itself,” Gartner .

“Content Marketing Platforms are the ideal channel-agnostic environments to tag and apply structure to content; thus, they create a de facto unified back-end to fragmented channel experiences.

“This extends to reporting, as many B2B marketers integrate their CMP with a marketing automation platform or CRM system to link content consumption with specific buyer profiles or target accounts.”

Forrester defines a CMP as a “a solution that helps marketing teams collaborate on a content strategy, orchestrate the numerous, concurrent streams of activity by content creators, curators, and distributors inside and outside of the company, and optimize downstream cross-channel distribution to key audiences”.

Forrester says, “if content is digital’s soul, then a CMP is the church”.

A CMP enables teams to transition to some form of agile marketing (light, medium or heavy, depending on the appetite for change and the business need to accelerate the generation and distribution of better quality content more often).

Given this dynamic, I was happy to participate in a recent webinar hosted by Australian content player Simple (they call their solution a Marketing Resource Management application) and the Australian Marketing Institute.

On June 20, together with Simple’s Sara Gonzalez, marketing capability expert Rachel Rohrlach and Simple’s product chief Michael McKerlie we discussed a Simple-AMI report which found that most marketers are struggling to meet basic brand governance expectations.

A significant majority (59%) of marketers reported that responsibility for managing the customer experience now rested with the chief marketing officer or marketing team at their organisation, according to the study, Marketing Resource Management in the Age of Intelligence.

The research showed marketers, hampered by the use of static tools to manage increasingly fluid processes, are struggling to obtain a big-picture view of marketing activities in areas such as planning, budgeting, governance and workflow:

• Only 13% easily monitor their spending against budget
• Just 10% say their primary planning tool provides an up-to-date view of their marketing plan
• 51% don’t monitor their marketing process at all
• And astoundingly, 41% have no formal process to manage compliance and governance issues.

Check out the webinar at the AMI site with this email address: simple@simple.io.

Simple and its competitors are addressing the fundamental question of how can marketing claim to own the customer experience if their upstream planning, production, distributor and brand governance is not aligned and flowing?

The imperative for B2B brands to deliver consumer-quality experiences as essential differentiators was a prominent theme at Salesforce’s Connections 2018 conference in Chicago earlier this month.

The consumerization of B2B companies is a building wave that will upset those who don’t embrace the transition. Salesforce itself is leveraging its recent B2B commerce platform CloudCraze.

Despite their traditional back-end complexity, B2B companies must attain UX simplicity. B2C consumers have long become accustomed to buying with once click and enjoying rich, engaging content. However, when they go to work they are confronted with legacy, green-screen ERP complexity, no engaging UI and no relevant communication and promotions.

Ok, B2B transactions can be complex, lengthy and involve a small army of stakeholders, influencers and decision makers, but successfully addressing this complexity must become an opportunity.

The consumerization of B2B means making the relationship as easy and as efficient as possible. It can typically mean going more direct, often by empowering the distribution channel with data.

It also means getting the so-called “middle office”, as distinct from the ERP back-end, better connected directly to the customer-facing front end so that configuring, pricing and quoting (CPQ) and contract life cycle management (CLM) flows far more smoothly and effectively than has been the norm for traditional B2B players.

I like the word flow. Are we, as a B2B organisation, flowing? Are we identifying and removing our internal, self-imposed and self-maintained legacy constraints? Are we acknowledging that the old B2B and B2C distinctions are less and less relevant as next-generation business tech mandates that we converge around H2H, Human-to-Human commerce?

The study, by the firm which describes itself as a customer experience consultancy, tracks the cumulative total stock returns for two model portfolios _ comprised of the Top 10 (“Leaders”) and the Bottom 10 (“Laggards”) publically traded companies in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Rankings.

According to the report’s latest edition, leaders outperform the broader market. They generated a total return that was 35 points higher than the S&P 500 Index. Laggards were far behind. Their total return was 45 points lower than the market.

Watermark states that “a great customer experience, and the internal ecosystem supporting it, can deliver tremendous strategic and economic value to a business, in a way that’s difficult for competitors to replicate”.

So why do the laggards “continue to subject their customers to complicated sales processes, cluttered websites, dizzying 800-line menus, long wait times, incompetent service, unintelligible correspondence, and products that are just plain difficult to use”?

Watermark says leaders embrace these basic tenets:

• They aim for more than customer satisfaction
• They nail the basics and then deliver pleasant surprises
• They understand that great experiences are intentional and emotional
• They shape customer impressions through cognitive science
• They recognize the link between the customer and employee experience

Download the report.

Good summary of the state of marketing in 50 slides from marketing management software company Percolate:

Here are my takeaways:

• Adults use their smart phones more than all other devices
• Vertical viewing is replacing horizontal viewing
• Mobile searches will soon replace desktops
• Millennials love their smart phone and cannot live without them
• Mobile is driving eCommerce
• Social’s share of Internet traffic is rising
• Lead generating is B2B’s biggest priority
• Blogging is B2B’s mmost important channel.

This is one of my favorite quotes from Customer Experience guru Bruce Temkin. It features prominently in my Customer Experience is the New Marketing presentation, which I delivered at Alex Allwood’s Customer Experience is the Brand book launch on June 29 in Sydney and again, in an updated form, on December 14 to a CIO-CMO audience assembled by IDG Communications, the publishers of ComputerWorld  and CMO Magazine, also in Sydney:

Here is the slide deck:

http://www.slideshare.net/MitchellMackey/mitchell-mackeys-customer-experience-is-the-new-marketing-june-29-2015-compatibility-mode

Graphic source: https://goo.gl/eZPlXV