Marketing and Sales: Will They or Won’t They?

Our industry has been talking about sales and marketing misalignment for a long time, and for good reason. Eighty-three percent of “World-Class” sales organizations identified in our annual sales effectiveness study say that sales, marketing and customer service are aligned on their customers’ needs and wants.
And while connecting sales and marketing is a goal for many (at least conceptually), our studies have also shown that success is rare. Only 39% of companies strongly agree/agree that such alignment exists in their organizations. This is reinforced by data in our Sales Optimization survey in which product development and marketing were named as the two functions that needed improvement or major design when it came to collaboration with sales enablement. And, our recent Sales Operations Optimization survey showed that sales operations had less involvement with marketing automation systems than any other component of the sales tech stack.
Sales and marketing still aren’t on the