The gap between Sales and Marketing – CRM and its use

Study finds the gap is still there

A new global study Closing the Gap: The Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative by the CMO Council is not only about the gap between Marketing and Sales, but also about the use of CRM.

Sales and marketing is still like a “A Tale of Two Cities” or “Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus” as 55% of all companies surveyed are just planning to implement programs and systems to unify these two important company functions.

The report highlights the technology, data shortcomings and solutions that should bind sales and marketing.
It reveals that neither sales nor marketing is effectively leveraging customer data and insight to form deeper, more connected relationships with the customer.

You can download the executive summary or buy the full report for $199.

CRM = frustration

The CMO Council found that although the use of CRM by Sales is far from universal, it is even less used by the Marketing department. Both groups experience significant levels of frustration in employing these tools.

They suggest that it’s time to embrace new technologies that enable wider and deeper customer conversations. Using customer listening and behaviour tracking systems provide for a real-time view of the customer experience to help engage the customer and deliver more relevant offers.

Read the executive summary for a more elaborate and wider explanation. Please note that although we have no affiliation with the CMO Council whatsoever, we think that parts of the executive summary will sound like a brochure for LEADSExplorer.

Our findings

Our feeling is that Marketing uses CRM tools as they are driven by the functionality of email and direct mail marketing. Whereas Sales people are reluctant to use the CRM as Sales reps do sandbag deals for their own benefit.

A lot of the current CRM tools also offer no real incentive for using them: they require a lot of manual data input but offer no real reward, no added value afterwards.

Digging deeper also reveals that Sales people often view the CRM only as a way their superiors can track their actions. And who wants to be a data entry typist without seing any real benefit, only thinking he or she is typing up a stick they might be beaten with ?

How many Sales people do you know that actively use a CRM ? And how many do you know that use excel or a bunch of textfiles instead of a ‘real’ CRM, even when they have access to one ?

These are exactly our findings when we were gathering feedback from sales and marketing professionals while prototyping LEADSExplorer. We have to admit though that our feedback group was a bit smaller than the more than 500 professionals the CMO Council surveyed.

Closing the gap

Both departments should see equal benefits in using Lead Generation and CRM. Partner or perish!

The Lead Generation solution should provide Sales with real leads.
The CRM should be a source of information, a real tool, not only a data entry system: A Computer Assisted Selling solution with serious consideration for usability.

Are you a marketing or sales professional ?
Do you use a ‘real’ CRM or do you keep your precious data in excel or something else ?

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