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What companies lose when their sales and email marketing teams don’t collaborate?
When email marketing and sales teams operate in silos, results suffer. In the US alone, the lack of collaboration between these teams leads to an estimated revenue loss of $1 trillion each year. In the UK, businesses lose up to 10% of their annual revenue when these teams fail to collaborate effectively.
What email marketers miss when they neglect sales insights
Here’s what can go wrong in email campaigns when sales insights are neglected:
- poor audience targeting: When armed with inadequate information, email marketers run the risk of sending offers to the wrong segments;
- lack of relevant personalization: Messaging may fail to address customer needs, pain points, or objections, resulting in low open and response rates; and
- missed upsell and cross-sell opportunities: Email marketers may not know about customers’ evolving needs, whereas sales representatives may not have the content needed to close more deals.
When marketing and sales messaging aren’t aligned, customers receive conflicting information. This creates confusion, erodes trust, and leads to lost opportunities in the sales funnel.
Why misalignment happens?
The root cause is often inadaptive business processes. Marketing and sales teams typically report to different managers and employ different strategies even though their shared goal is business growth.
Traditionally, email marketing covers the top of the sales funnel, which depicts customer journey, whereas sales handles the bottom. Once a lead is passed to the sales team, the marketing team steps back, typically for good. However, this linear model no longer works.
Customers begin interacting with brands (e.g., they read emails) long before their first purchase, and they continue communicating after a deal is closed. Therefore, companies must maintain alignment between sales and email marketing teams, as this is a key factor in ensuring a seamless customer experience.
The above teams engage the same audience using different tools. Thus, integrating their efforts ensures a smoother, more effective customer journey.
How to address misalignment
A closer look at the sales funnel in light of the current context can help us understand the customer journey and its influencing factors better.
Try to examine a typical product or service with a 60–90-day sales cycle, as Levon suggests. When this product or service is mapped visually, you’ll find that the sales journey highlights the gaps and opportunities for collaboration.
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of the Gartner respondents say the most effective tactic to align the sales and marketing teams is to create a liaison role that attends to the functions of both teams.