Closing the Gap Between Sales and Marketing: New Report

B2B marketing and sales teams get better results when working together.

As I’ve said before in an article “Five Tips for Integrating Marketing and Sales,” there are big rewards when sales and marketing are effectively integrated.

The CMO Council just launched their latest report entitled Closing the Gap: The Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative.

In short, this report found:

Over 55 percent of some 506 sales and marketing professions surveyed say their companies have yet to, or are only planning to, implement formal programs, systems or processes for unifying sales and marketing functions. In contrast, of those who have, nearly 50 percent report success in synchronizing and optimizing these often-polarized areas.

It goes on to provide details on these topics and more:

Benefits of alignment to both company and customer
Road blocks and challenges
The key elements to maximize sales
What should be done to improve the results of the sales organization
Elements of optimizing marketing performance

To download the Executive Summary (free) or full report ($199):

Closing the Gap: The Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative

How integrated are sales and marketing at your company? Do you see it improving in the future? Please share your story in a comment below.

2 Comments • Add your comment...

Mac, We commissioned a similar report, “Improve Lead Generation and Clean Up Your Pipeline” from CSO Insights. They surveyed over 2,000 sales and marketing professionals and it also found that lead quality was a critical factor in the Sales and Marketing disconnect. The big news is the cost: The report said that companies that aren’t aligned on lead quality suffer a 10% drop in closing percentages and a 5.7% drop in revenue. I wonder why, with so much at stake, companies aren’t doing more about it.

Left by Parker Trewin on August 4th, 2008

[...] comment on an earlier post, Closing the Gap Between Sales and Marketing: New Report, got me thinking about the role of sales leads in marketing and sales alignment from a [...]

Left by Sales leads play a big role in B2B marketing and sales alignment | Sales Lead Insights: B2B Marketing Blog on August 19th, 2008