This blog was originally posted on RampedUp.us. Read the full post here.
When marketing and sales don’t see eye to eye, businesses suffer. Companies waste at least $1 trillion annually on ineffective marketing efforts and decreased sales productivity. Sales teams ignore 80 percent of marketing leads. It’s one thing to talk about this misalignment. It’s another thing to fix it.
The good news is account-based marketing (ABM) has become a catalyst to address this long-standing culture clash between sales and marketing teams by getting the two sides to come to the table and put shared revenue objectives on a scorecard. It’s impossible to try ABM without CMOs and CROs first agreeing to set common goals and metrics—email open rates and retweets simply do not work as ABM objectives.
Unite Marketing and Sales through Revenue
To embrace ABM as a discipline, marketers need to get comfortable owning revenue responsibilities. This is scary for a lot of CMOs, let alone their teams.
Today, most marketers know that clicks, likes, and website visits are a means to an end. You have to have a lot of this activity from the right people to get them to buy. Operationalizing that transformation needs to become a focus for marketing in the months ahead.
If the first step is owning revenue responsibility, the second is demonstrating ownership by extending an olive branch to the sales team. It’s our fault as marketers that we’ve trained them to think that they can’t trust our leads and that they’re on their own at the end of each quarter because we’ve done our jobs.
This blog was originally posted on RampedUp.us. Read the rest of the post on the RampUp blog here.