When you think of the phrase “match made in heaven,” you probably don’t think about sales and marketing. And yet, few combinations are as powerful as when sales professionals and marketers are operating at the same frequency — if only it happened more often.
At the end of 2022, Gartner surveyed 200 sales team leaders to discover their top priority in the coming year. Their answer: sales and marketing alignment. Why? Because organizations with aligned sales and marketing teams are three times more likely to exceed new customer acquisition targets.
Unfortunately, bridging the gap between your departments isn’t that easy. It’s not an overnight process and requires buy-in from top to bottom. One way to get the ball rolling is to back up your effort with tangible facts and figures — or in other words, sales and marketing alignment statistics.
To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of the best B2B sales and marketing alignment stats. In this blog, we’ll break down the numbers that illustrate its biggest benefits, challenges and opportunities for success.
The Benefits of Alignment
Sales and marketing alignment is a process of connecting the dots between your sales team and the marketing department. It’s an agreement between both sides to share goals, priorities, strategies, procedures and more.
At its most basic, you can think of it as keeping everyone on the same page. In turn, you can ensure the entire organization works together rather than with competing interests that undercut the other.
Why does this matter? Here are some sales and marketing alignment stats that demonstrate its advantages:
- According to HubSpot’s 2023 report, 22.1% of sales professionals say the biggest benefit of alignment is it helps them close more deals. Furthermore, the same survey found that 20.3% of marketing and sales teams say increased win rates are the top advantage.
- Businesses with aligned sales and marketing teams are 67% more efficient at closing deals.
- Aberdeen reports that highly aligned organizations see a 32% year-over-year revenue growth compared to those that aren’t.
- According to Forrester, organizations that align their sales and marketing departments grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable.
- Alignment has numerous advantages for B2B sales organizations. If sales reps and marketers work in synergy, they can save 30% on customer acquisition costs. They also have a 36% greater retention rate and boost lifetime value by at least 20%.
Sales and Marketing Misalignment: Challenges and Statistics
There’s no denying the data: Sales and marketing alignment is a clear pathway to success. However, as reported by HubSpot, just 23.1% of sales professionals say their organization is strongly aligned.
This divide can be traced back to a number of factors, including:
- Poor lead quality: Only 9.1% of sales team members say the leads received from the marketing department were very high quality. This is often because teams have different definitions of “qualified lead,” among many other critical indicators.
- Disjointed strategies: According to LinkedIn’s Global B2B Marketing Benchmark report, 90% of sales and marketing professionals point to several disconnects across strategy, process, content and objectives. In other words, the vast majority struggle to agree on a wide variety of essential topics.
- Lack of communication: One-third of sales and marketing teams don’t hold regular meetings. This makes it difficult to foster cross-department collaboration and only further fractures the relationship between departments.
- Different metrics: 40% of survey respondents say sales and marketing goals are being measured by different metrics. Salesforce corroborates this data, reporting that just 52% of sales and marketing teams share common goals and metrics.
Sales and marketing misalignment can have a detrimental effect on your business. For example:
- 52.2% of sales professionals said the biggest impact of sales and marketing team misalignment is lost sales and revenue.
- Per a LinkedIn survey, 60% of global respondents believe that misalignment between sales and marketing could damage financial performance.
- An estimated $1 trillion dollars a year is lost due to a lack of sales and marketing coordination.
Effective Strategies for Achieving Alignment
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to help sales reps and marketers see eye to eye. Let’s examine some of the most useful tactics for strengthening their relationship:
- Goal alignment: Having at least one shared goal can help B2B marketers and salespeople work together toward the same objective. For instance, if both teams are focused on pipeline generation, you can implement strategies that allow them to work in harmony. Currently, 38.3% of sales leaders say alignment on goals and strategy is a top priority for their marketing department.
- Collaboration: 87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between their departments enables critical revenue growth. It’s often easiest to create a more collaborative environment once you’ve previously aligned on a shared goal and execution strategy, as this allows you to allocate roles and responsibilities to your team members.
- Account-based marketing (ABM): ABM strategies allow teams to concentrate on certain target accounts rather than a wider audience. According to research, 76% of B2B marketers say ABM-based approaches deliver a higher ROI than other marketing efforts. Moreover, high-performing marketers are 1.5x more likely than underperformers to collaborate with sales teams on ABM programs.
- Technology and automation: Organizations may use a mixed bag of platforms and solutions. If they’re incompatible with few integrations it can silo data and keep teams disconnected. Breaking down this barrier with highly integrated tools can ensure everyone has access to critical information. In fact, 96% of companies that report being well-aligned organizationally are also aligned on sales and marketing technology.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, organizations can strengthen alignment by emphasizing customer engagements, such as prospect meetings and sessions. Marketers can nurture B2B buyers at a pivotal point in their customer journey by booking sales representatives, executives, product experts, and other stakeholders into customer engagements. This accelerates the sales process, thereby fueling revenue growth and other business outcomes.
Consider the numbers:
- 65.3% of salespeople say product demos were the most effective sales enablement content. 30.9% of sales leaders say establishing trust and rapport with prospects became more crucial between 2021 and 2022 — and engagements allow them to do exactly that.
- 53% of marketers consider webinars the most effective way to obtain high-quality leads. Furthermore, in-person events are seen as the best method for generating leads by 19% of B2B organizations, and they successfully convert leads for 25% of companies.
- 20% of B2B buyers prefer more in-person encounters in the future.
Clearly, sales and marketing teams agree that meetings and sessions matter. However, the booking process is much more complicated than you might expect.
Making the Case for Meeting Scheduling Automation
Whether you’re a sales rep or a marketer, the meeting scheduling workflow is exceptionally complex. You have to coordinate multiple calendars, time zones, topics and sessions simultaneously, which is impossible without the proper technology.
Worse yet, you can’t afford to make avoidable mistakes when you have multi-million dollar deals on the line. Even a single error can have mighty repercussions — luckily, meeting scheduling automation is the easy solution.
Let’s look at the numbers:
- 68% of employees have too much work to handle daily, underscoring the need to relieve workers of mundane and manual tasks. Currently, at least 50% of organizations plan to do so with automation.
- Many sales and marketing teams rely on spreadsheets to manage scheduling, but 88% of spreadsheets contain errors.
- Scheduling is too complex for manual tools and basic apps. According to one study, 42.4% of meetings get rescheduled. That means almost half the time, B2B appointments will need to be rebooked and coordinated, further complicating the process.
- 78% of business leaders believe that automating tasks increases the productivity of all stakeholders. Another 31% believe it can help reduce labor costs. Organizations that have implemented automation report a cost reduction of 24%, which is up from 19% in 2019.
- Automation boosts sales productivity by 14.5% and brings down marketing costs by 12.2%
. - According to one study, a 30% to 45% revenue increase is highly possible with appointment scheduling software.
Simply put, the power of automation cannot be underestimated. This is especially true in the context of B2B appointment scheduling.
With Jifflenow’s robust meeting scheduling automation platform, you can eliminate manual errors and streamline booking from start to finish. Enable inbound requests mapped to specific topics, engagement types and meeting locations to expedite the process and enhance the customer experience.
Our solution allows you to offer multiple meeting types — also mapped to topics and internal experts — to eliminate back-and-forth communication for outbound scheduling efforts. Plus, you can improve collaboration and solidify sales and marketing alignment with a centralized hub for schedules, meeting information, and more.
Discover the Playbook for Sales and Marketing Alignment
Whether it be at trade shows and conferences or as a complement to your demand-gen campaigns, prospect meetings are key to optimizing the sales process. More importantly, they’re a crucial stepping stone sales and marketing teams need to maximize alignment.
Looking for more information? Check out our latest eBook for more insights on how you can strengthen sales and marketing alignment in a B2B engagement strategy.
