Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment

What is it about the December holidays that causes fits of nostalgia and list making? No analyst is immune, so cliché as it may be, here’s my addition to the 2009 retrospective: A list of five things that surprised me in the world of b-to-b marketing, and what can be done about them.

1. Too many marketers still treat a “response” like it’s a lead. The simple act of responding to a marketing offer is just that: a response. An inquiry. In and of itself, the act of responding does not signal readiness to move into an active buying process. It never has. If you’re still sending raw inquiries to sales and partners, make 2010 the year you fix that. Our benchmark data proves you will be happy you did.
2. The gap between marketing planning and buyer preferences is huge. It’s a buyer’s world, baby, and we marketers must embrace it. Trouble is, so much marketing activity is driven by siloed tactic planning and generating one-time inquiries (see number 1, above) that we lose sight of what prospects and customers need and want over the course of a long-term buying process. Embracing buyer focus is even harder when tactic-oriented myopia is institutionalized in the marketing planning process. Remember what assuming does to you and me when we fail to use what we know about the people with whom we want to build relationships. It’s time to change marketing planning to map to the buying cycle, not how we want to sell.
3. Twitter is really, really useful. What a great tool for marketers to learn from each other and share ideas. But you can’t win if you don’t play, so if you aren’t convinced about the merits of social media in general and Twitter in particular, I challenge you to follow the #b2b tweet stream for one day. Let me know if you can end that day without learning at least a little something.
4. Bad data is the root of most marketing evil. So maybe this isn’t a surprise so much as an inconvenient truth growing more obvious. Data quality, once a frightfully dull topic to most marketers, is now the one I can’t go a day without talking about. The curse of past poor data management is its impact on nearly everything marketers want to implement right now, from marketing automation and lead nurturing to better dashboards. Focusing on data as a strategic asset must become a central marketing effort.
5. Marketers want definitive, hard-dollar metrics. It’s the rise of the left brain in marketing these days. So many companies I speak to are looking for more accurate ways to measure the impact of marketing, but they’re frustrated by a lack of quality data and the time and complexity involved in doing that. If 2009 was the year marketers got serious about defining measurement shortcomings, then 2010 should see great progress on fixing them because marketers are determined to make this happen. Not coincidentally, reporting tools are getting better and better to keep up with the demand. My hope is that the biggest surprise of 2010 will be how quickly marketers embrace quantitative analytics as key to improving program performance, not just tracking results.