Bridging the Divide: The Information Disconnect Between Marketing and Sales

According to a recent article published in Entrepreneur magazine, 79% of leads generated by a company’s marketing department go without a response from the sales team. Conversely, the sales department frequently fails to update the marketing department regarding valuable customer feedback received, despite it being the department with the most direct user contact, and thus insight into effective product messaging.

The Age Old Feud

These two facts are actually part of a much larger problem – the commonly occurring disconnect between a company’s sales and marketing departments. Forbes says that these two departments have been pointing fingers at each other for years due to: 1. Separate internal agendas. 2. Competition over company resources. 3. Demands on employees to meet differing departmental goals that often focus on quantity over quality. 4. The varying personality types that lend themselves to the two position types.

The Solution: Communications is Key

The above issues were discussed and analyzed by Harvard Business Review back in 2006, in which the authors advocated that the need for better department communication was key to bridging the divide and improving company revenue. Their suggested tactics for achieving this included traditional methods such as: frequent departmental updates, rotating company positions, creating joint departmental assignments and increasing the frequency of department feedback. The need for information integration between departments and databases was brought up as well, however, there was not much push on the topic, perhaps due to the limited technological abilities to make it happen.

Resource Integration

Fast-forward a decade into the rapidly developing age of technology. While the recommended solution of increased departmental communication remains the same, resource integration has now become the advised method for carrying it out. Thanks to the automation of sales and marketing processes and valuable new insights into the user-journey process, there are now a large variety of technological tools available to companies, as well as large corporations; these tools can be used to effectively bridge the divide, streamline processes between departments and boost customer conversions.

The Latest Tools

The following are just a few examples of such tools:

CRM platforms – Designed to streamline the lead generation and lead nurturing processes as well as foster personalized customer relationships, thus boosting sale conversions.

Real-time dynamic reporting – Designed to gain further insight into the buyer’s user journey, and derive data-based conclusions, for more accurate decision making purposes.

Collaboration and project management solutions – Designed to help multiple departments collaborate on the same project simultaneously, while tracking project progress, estimating and updating project deadlines, identifying and addressing instances of bottleneck, and avoiding occurrences of overlap.

CRM app integrations – Designed to integrate with your choice of CRM, expanding the traditional CRM capabilities, while still keeping all information on one central platform. Sample integration technologies include: personalized interactive document generation services, marketing automation programs, email marketing capabilities, small business management solutions and more.

Learn how Docomotion, an innovative Salesforce add-on, is connecting marketing and sales teams through positioning sales resources as a channel for marketing. Docomotion transforms sales documents (or any other operational documents) into a communication channel by offering highly personalized promotional offers.

We created a full Powerpoint template to help you demonstrate the benefits your company will see by using sales documents as a channel for marketing. Click here to download.