Smarketing, alignment, integration. Whatever you call it and however you wrap it up it's no secret that sales and marketing aren't as well aligned as we had thought.
In traditionally sales led companies, marketing will be planning their year ahead with a calendar of events and a peppering of globally created campaigns that are being passed down for local execution. It's difficult to find time (and budget) for an extra layer called "Content Marketing".
But this is where it is broken. If both marketing and sales aligned their events and campaigns to the buyer journey, they could craft relevant content around the only stakeholder that really counts in this whole process...the buyer.
When this happens, deal cycles shorten, closure rates decrease and budgets for content marketing increase (see below).
It's time that sales and marketing stop trying to align to each other and started aligning around the buyer!
When asked which one factor would most strengthen content marketing and sales alignment within their organization, the less well aligned marketers’ top response, by far, was “a company culture that encourages alignment/collaboration.” Alignment empowers marketers to build a better business case for content marketing. Consider: 61% of those with high alignment expected their content marketing budget to increase in 2018 (versus only 35% of those with low alignment). There was much higher uncertainty about content marketing budget among those that are less well aligned. This suggests that highly aligned marketing and sales teams are proving the value of their efforts, either through revenue and/or pipeline growth (which they indicated are their top two success metrics), or other ROI metrics.
