The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council has just released a report noting that companies are struggling to integrate their demand generation functions and this lack of integration is inhibiting the productivity of their sales processes. Results from the CMO’s Sales + Marketing Integration Audit suggest that there’s a need for:
- more valuable business systems for demand generation, used more widely. Among those with CRM systems, only 13% view such systems as highly valued and widely deployed.
- more formal processes, more tightly integrated across functions. Over 50% of companies lack formal programs, systems, or processes for unifying demand generation functions across Sales and Marketing
- better metrics on the impacts of process integration. Amongst those that do have such integration, over 40% do not know whether or not the initiatives have been successful
- higher performing sales teams and more predictable sales results. Fully 40% of respondents feel that sales organizations could definitely perform better as a whole and only 7% describe sales as highly competent and predictable in performance.
These findings suggest there are two keys to improving the productivity of sales teams.
First, new systems must be dead simple and obviously helpful. Sales has always been a results-oriented profession. Sales Reps are skilled, impatient, people who will only willingly use tools that are simple to operate and obviously helpful in generating a result.
Second, users’ skills, and the predictability of their results, are both more obvious and better whenever the guesswork (of which prospects are genuinely interested) is eliminated. The key: real-time metrics on user productivity, based on what prospects have done (not what they’ve said or promised).
New tools are emerging that meet these requirements. Proof of their impacts on team productivity is provided by this example.
