Manage Your Marketing: Why You Need To Communicate With Sales | Business 2 Community

We talk a lot about concepts like “integrated marketing” and “silo busting” here, but we thought that we would make those concepts a little more real today by talking about how marketing can – and should – communicate effectively with the sales team. Why is this an important topic? Consider this infographic which shows that only 5% of companies surveyed are satisfied with the marketers running their social media campaign.Even more disturbing, consider these findings published in a Columbia Business School presentation in 2012:

91% of senior corporate marketers believe that successful brands use customer data

to drive marketing decisions

Yet, 39% say their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not real-time enough

And 51% say that a lack of sharing customer data within their own organization

is a barrier to effectively measuring their marketing ROI

65% of marketers said that comparing the effectiveness of marketing across different digital media is “a major challenge” for their business

37% of respondents did not include any mention of financial outcomes when asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization

57% are not basing their marketing budgets on any ROI analysis

22% are using brand awareness as their sole measure to evaluate their marketing spend

Let’s pose the question this way. If someone came to you and said, “We’d like you to invest $20,000 in this opportunity, but we’re not going to tell you whether or how much it benefits you,” would you accept that offer? Probably not. However, the above statements demonstrate that many companies do just that with their marketing investments. A key factor in fixing many of these problems is improving the communication between your sales and marketing teams.

How communication between marketing and sales should work

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