Why sales and marketing should be integrated?

Over recent years, on average, the businesses that we support at The Hidden Market have held quite distinct functions for sales and marketing. Specialisms within these functions have been deeper and even more distinct too. 

Whilst this has happened technological changes have continued to drive the digitalisation of business and in 2020 COVID sped up the process of digitalisation too. 

Historically, sales and marketing in more traditional businesses have been grouped together. Now sales and marketing are different skillsets but their work is interlinked. Directly due to technological developments it is now possible for the marketing department to be fully accountable for revenue to a business, depending on the business and and their marketing & sales model. 

We at The Hidden Market support businesses across B2B and B2C markets and clearly the marketing driving sales in consumer markets such as eCommerce is not an insight, but we’ve seen the rise of marketing even in the most traditional B2B markets. In these B2B markets we see brand, digital and content marketing starting the awareness of a business, product or service and initiating the conversation. 

Marketing attribution metrics are able to measure the performance of marketing in relation to sales and as such there is more accountability to performance and investment spend. Even, should there not be accountability we are fully able to track marketing qualified leads from the brand, digital, content activity described above. 

Sales has traditionally held accountability for revenue but as is evident revenue figures are now shared or split between sales and marketing teams. 

What does it mean for marketing & sales teams and CMO’s and CRO’s: 

Sales and Marketing teams: 

Over recent years we have seen within functional teams, particularly marketing, that there has been a rise in blended roles and you can read more about that here in another blog we have written about blended roles.

We expect that going forward sales and marketing teams will become ever more integrated and this might be driven for the need of shared accountability for revenue numbers irrespective of the nuances of individual businesses marketing and sales models. 

What it means for Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Revenue Officers:

Clearly, there will be industry nuances here but whoever sits at the top of the tree in an organisational structure will have to ultimately be responsible for revenue. Depending on the organisation the title and responsibilities will vary: some businesses will appoint a CMO and others will opt for a CRO. The title is not important but we expect CMO’s to have greater accountability for revenue targets, either directly or indirectly. Ultimately, the sales and marketing teams will be working even more closely together for the ultimate goal of revenue generation.