The Marketing-Sales chasm, and how RevOps can bridge the gap
Marketing is from Mars, Sales is from Venus
TLDR = There is a Marketing-sales chasm, it exists because of data and organizational reasons, it needs to be fixed because it impacts revenue, RevOps as a practice can bridge this chasm, BigLittle enables RevOps teams to bridge the gap.
The Marketing-Sales Chasm
Marketing and Sales often run out of step with each other. According to a LinkedIn study, 90 percent of sales and marketing professionals point to a number of disconnects between the teams across strategy, process, content, and culture. This is, in some ways, natural: as businesses grow, their functioning quickly begins to take on the lumbering tendencies of elaborate machinery. Teams communicate less regularly, drifting towards a focus on individual goals, causing friction and asynchronicity to creep into the overall functioning of corporations.
When Marketing and Sales teams run anti-synergistically, there are certain, distinct symptoms: often, marketing can over-optimize their lead scoring for maximum pipeline leading sales to have to deal with the vagaries of under-cooked MQLs. Sales, on the other hand, may be letting perfectly qualified leads fall through the cracks, and these stale leads eventually return from sales for remarketing. Marketing blames sales, and sales blames marketing. One or both may be right but why do these schisms occur in the first place? And what is the impact of them to the business performance of the company?
What’s Causing This?
There are several reasons for the marketing-sales chasm. Often, marketing and sales success are assigned and evaluated by different metrics, which can lead them to operate completely out of alignment with each other and the overall strategic plan. Org hierarchy and internal politics can also hamper cross-functional alignment, especially in the high-pressure cauldron created by quarterly objectives and targets.
Marketing and sales teams also work with distinctly separate tools operating on isolated data sources, which restricts leaders of both teams from having visibility into the full funnel. Siloed tools also means teams work from different perceptions of ground truth, leading to information dissonance – creating a communication barrier that prevents teams from understanding each other’s perspective, and underlying goals and challenges. Teams also lack the ability to rectify operational issues in real-time, causing mistakes to get amplified and the blame to go around.
Why Should We Care?
“Tightly aligned” companies, where Marketing and Sales are closely aligned achieve 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth. Yet, as per a Hubspot report, 1 in 4 companies say their marketing and sales teams are “misaligned” or “rarely aligned”—something that causes B2B companies to lose 10% or more in revenue annually.
“Misalignment between sales and marketing can cost B2B companies 10% or more of revenue loss annually”.
Hubspot
Crossing the Chasm with Revenue Operations
RevOps is an organizational transformation initiative with the power to “cross” this chasm. RevOps brings marketing, sales, and customer success on the same page, breaking down the functional barriers between these teams, and ensuring that all teams involved take ownership of a single, defined objective – revenue. By uniting the teams under a single revenue leader with a common synergistic goal, the company can sidestep some of the aforementioned organizational challenges around functional hierarchies and misaligned metrics.
But it doesn’t end there. In order for RevOps to fully address the marketing-sales chasm, revenue leaders need to lay down a strategy and framework to maximise organizational transparency and align the teams on end-to-end processes, as well as overall metrics and data sources:
- Data: The integrated ops team needs to work off a unified end-to-end revenue data model spanning both marketing and sales. A single source of revenue truth will provide a common basis for data-driven decision-making.
- Metrics: There needs to be upfront consensus on metrics, milestones and SLAs for all teams. Rather than rely on coarse-grained “waterfall” KPIs, teams are incentivized to perform across many granular metrics, some individualized and some shared across the team.
- Process: The revenue operation is re-designed for seamless operation from lead generation and nurturing to SDR qualification to opportunity discovery and close. Inefficiencies around handoffs from one team to another are identified and wilfully resolved.
- Technology: The operational tool stack is enhanced to enable full funnel visibility and early identification of revenue-impacting issues anywhere in the funnel. A common dashboard of revenue metrics and actionable insights keeps everyone on the same page and responsive to the needs of the business.
With alignment on data, metrics and revenue processes, and with the aid of technology for full funnel visibility and fine-tuning, organizations can look to bridge the Marketing-Sales chasm and set the individuals on these teams up for shared success.
BigLittle Is Helping Empower The New RevOps
At BigLittle, we are helping define and build this future of RevOps. We are the Intelligence and Orchestration layer for RevOps teams and can track and triage all revenue processes end-to-end across marketing, sales and customer success operations. By working with and at a level above the operational tools, we can help RevOps teams to avoid alert fatigue and insight storms by streamlining revenue processes across sales, marketing, and customer success.
Get in touch with us to know more.
