Today’s interview is with Scott Addington, VP of EMEA Marketing for SugarCRM. Scott joins me today to talk about letting the platform do the work, the continued misalignment of sales and marketing teams, what it is costing them, what they should do about it and how technology can help.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The end of the customer experience is so important but is often looked – Interview with Joe Macleod #Endineering – and is number 410 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Scott:

• We’ve been talking about the alignment or misalignment of sales and marketing teams for over 20 years now.
• Only 1 in 3 (33%) of sales and marketing leaders think their teams are well aligned. (SugarCRM Pulse Survey – 2021)
• Only 2% of marketers say they experience perfect alignment. They feel the root cause of this misalignment is a mis-match when it comes to goal-setting and incentivisation. (SugarCRM Pulse Survey – 2021)
• The people that are in sales and marketing teams are often playing different games.
• Scott: My wife has a wonderful saying….a fish rots from the head.
• Much of the misalignment starts and comes from the top of organisations.
• If you ask people in sales what alignment means and ask people what in marketing, what alignment means. You’d probably get 10 different answers if you ask 10 different people.
• Sales representatives ignore 50% of the marketing leads (TAS Group)
• Only 56% of B2B companies check valid leads before passing them to the sales dept (Marketing Sherpa)
• LinkedIn: Businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective in closing deals, 58% more effective in retaining customers and drove 208% more revenue as a result of their marketing.
• Forrester: Highly aligned companies grow 19% faster than companies that are not aligned and are 15% more profitable.
• The business case for alignment is very clear.
• Two great case studies of companies that have achieved great alignment:
  • Agriconomie (http://www.agriconomie.com/) and a case study.
  • Neenah (https://www.neenahpaper.com/) and a case study.
• There’s a sudden realisation from a a lot of manufacturers they may need to try and take their supply chain into their own hands and go a little bit more direct to their consumer, whether that’s an end consumer or a B2B customer.
• We will see this trend continue with a lot more manufacturers going direct or at least having a hybrid model where they offer an option to buy direct.
• That brings with it a whole raft of other customer service and customer relationship challenges that a manufacturer wouldn’t have had to think about that in the past.
• One bit of advice: Communicate better.
• There’s a lot of talking and not a lot of listening, not a lot of proper communications both internally and externally.
• I would encourage people in sales, service and marketing to get together more frequently.
• Service will learn from sales and marketing and vice versa. It’s a virtuous cycle.
• Don’t be afraid of involving sales in in the marketing planning process.
• Scott’s Punk CX word(s): Unconventional. Unconstrained.
• Scott’s Punk CX brand: Tesla.
  

About Scott

Scott Addington is the VP of EMEA Marketing for SugarCRM.

A B2B marketing leader and strategic thinker with an exceptional drive for results. Specialising in meeting and exceeding pipeline and lead generation targets for complex, large value enterprise software sales.

Check out SugarCRM, say Hi to them and Scott on Twitter @SugarCRM and @scott_addington and feel free to connect with Scott on LinkedIn here.

Thanks to geralt on Pixabay for the image.