Author: Dillon Baker / Source: The Content Strategist
Walk the floors of Vegas’s casinos and you’ll see thousands of people putting their money inside of brightly colored and flashing boxes. When you sit down at the box and put the money in, you never know if your investment will provide any sort of return.
That’s kind of how marketing used to work. Teams would invest a certain amount in one channel, maybe more in another, maybe less in a third. Revenue would, hopefully, come out the other end in the form of sales. But no one really knew for sure if a return was heading their way or not.
At SiriusDecisions Summit 2018, held at the glittering Mandalay Bay in Vegas, it was clear that marketers are tired of black boxes. We’ve been giving lip service to improving the connection between marketing activities and sales for years. But if the conversations, vendors, and presentations were any indication, that alignment is a key goal for many of the top marketing teams across the country.
Sales and marketing: Best friends forever?
If you scan the list of vendors who ponied up for SiriusDecisions sponsorships, you’ll see a few key categories: sales enablement (Seismic, Highspot), account-based marketing (6sense, Terminus), and sales readiness/operations (Bigtincan, Brainshark).
Most people I talked to during the event had the same question: How do I improve my sales team’s productivity? Some common symptoms popped up around the fact that teams struggle to train salespeople and keep messaging consistent. As a result, salespeople regularly use outdated assets or none at all, and that activity often goes untracked.
The symptoms seemed to hint at a larger issue—marketing doesn’t trust sales, and sales doesn’t trust marketing. Salespeople think they know how to win each opportunity their own way. Marketers want to scale their content and messaging across a salesforce skeptical of their abilities. Meanwhile, sales teams are overwhelmed by software they don’t use or don’t believe in.
Many vendors are jumping to solve this disconnect. Some want…
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