How's Your Interoperability Between Marketing And Sales?

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

When interoperability is mentioned, most of us think about technology and how computer systems, software and other applications can effectively exchange information.

However, if we look a bit deeper, we realize that interoperability is about people. After all, technology is intended to enable us to function more efficiently and effectively.

Interoperability is achieved when two systems, or in this case, people and teams, seamlessly exchange and make effective use of information. It seems to me that no functional imperative of business is more challenged at achieving this than sales and marketing.

Because the common goal of B2B sales and marketing is generating revenue, we can accept that achieving interoperability deserves our best efforts. But the painful truth is that the lack of a seamless flow of actionable information between marketing and sales is more common than we wish to recognize, and it is killing our businesses.

The challenge in attaining marketing and sales interoperability is that most of us think we don’t have a problem and we accept a level of dysfunction as just the way it is. How do you know you might have problems that are limiting your revenue growth? Here are some symptoms. 

1. Your organization lacks a single leader responsible for revenue generation and instead, siloes marketing and sales at the executive level.
2. Marketing and sales rarely talk and when they do, there is often a lot of finger-pointing when sales aren’t materializing.
3. Your company lacks a standard definition for MQLs and SQLs.
4. There are no common criteria for when marketing hands-off a lead to sales.  
5. When a lead transitions from marketing to sales, it requires no more than a category change in your CRM and lacks an exchange of actionable information.
6. Your teams lack any way of tracking prospects through their entire buyer’s journey and instead measure results only by sales closed.

I believe that this is an important topic that is crippling some really good B2B solution providers.

If you have some of the symptoms above or feel like your sales and marketing interoperability has room for improvement, here is an article that will help you.

Accelerate Business Growth With Sales And Marketing Interoperability (followyourbuyer.com)