Kapost Benchmark Identifies the State of B2B Sales-Marketing Alignment

While 68 percent of marketers and salespeople “agree” or “strongly agree” that “our marketing and sales teams are closely aligned,” 55 percent of marketers don’t know which assets sales uses most.

Kapost, partner to marketers building a content operation, today launched The 2018 Marketing-Sales Alignment Benchmark, the company’s first report on the state of alignment between B2B sales and marketing teams at midmarket and enterprise organizations.

The report includes data from a survey of more than 270 marketers and salespeople to examine how well these teams work together to keep up with rising expectations of personalization in the Age of the Customer. Kapost’s report highlighted that marketing and sales professionals are not as aligned as they might think: While 68 percent of marketers and salespeople “agree” or “strongly agree” that “our marketing and sales teams are closely aligned,”

55 percent of marketers don’t know which assets sales uses most, and 68 percent of marketers believe sales aren’t using marketing content to its full potential.

“Today B2B companies must focus on addressing buyers’ pain points rather than only selling their solutions. This customer-centric model requires a company’s teams to work together to provide a consistent, outstanding customer experience, starting with marketing and sales teams,” said Paralee Walls, Director of Digital Marketing and Content Operations at Kapost.

“Marketing has invested heavily in becoming more customer-centric. But, despite these investments, they have yet to change how they operate internally: how their own people organize and collaborate to produce the customer experience,” said Kapost CEO and Co-founder Toby Murdock.

Key findings in Kapost’s benchmark include —

• 61 percent of marketers and 72 percent of sales say their organizations have “adopted a customer-centric approach to marketing.”
• According to 62 percent of marketers and 61 percent of salespeople, “key internal stakeholders agree that inconsistent messaging across the buyer’s journey has a negative impact on customer experience.”
• 33 percent of marketing and sales teams don’t have a standing meeting.
• Just 35 percent of sales reps believe marketing knows what content the sales team needs. At companies with more than 5,000 employees, this drops to 26 percent.

Thanks to more digital channels available making information more accessible to consumers than ever before, the buyer’s journey has fundamentally changed. In response, companies must evaluate how to understand and meet audiences’ expectations as educated prospects and partners. Internal misalignment can significantly inhibit companies’ ability to achieve this.

“Before improving our alignment, our biggest pain point was getting content to the sales team. It became clear that the amount of time salespeople wasted looking for content amounted to lost productivity,” said Kapost user Kristin Fallon, marketing communications director at GE Power.

Kristin Fallon was among the 277 marketers (62 percent of respondents), sales professionals (25 percent), and other professionals (13 percent) who provided survey data for the report, representing B2B (62 percent), B2C (12 percent), and hybrid B2B-and-B2C (26 percent) companies. Respondents’ positions at their companies varied, including managers (25 percent), directors (20 percent), coordinators (13 percent), operations (12 percent), other (16 percent), vice president or senior vice president (seven percent), and C-suite (seven percent).

Currently, Kapost partners with B2B marketers as they build and manage a content operation that produces and delivers the right content to the right customer at the right time at scale. Kapost offers benchmarked, expert consulting services and a comprehensive software platform to support B2B marketers as they apply a new operating model to the processes and software.