Sales and Marketing Alignment Showdown

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We looked for extreme differences between respondents from the five main countries. We didn’t delve as deeply here as we did in other areas of our survey, so don’t take these findings too seriously.

That said, the Canadians were our performance poster child in this report – let them enjoy the moment.

If you have listened to some of my recent blogs, you know that in 2005 we published the first of our landmark reports into alignment. What we learned then has shaped much of the debate on the topic of alignment ever since.

In 2014 we published the 2013 refresh of the landmark alignment research

What we learned about training, process, automation, structure, tactics, demand generation, measurement and location is going to get the debate started all over again

In this blog I am going to focus on just one chapter from that report. Chapter 10 looks at regional differences in alignment, and closure rates at various stages in the buyer’s journey.

I’ll also show you how to get the whole report, for free, at the end of this video

• Canadians are deeply concerned about alignment, but seem to be the best at it (is there a link?).They enjoy a 21% higher closure rate for MQLs than Americans, and Sales is 48% more likely to accept those leads, resulting in the highest proportion of revenue coming from Marketing and best customer retention by a mile.How wonderfully ironic that the music I happened to be listening to when I scripted this blog was “where in the world are you?”. Better yet: the band is ‘Great Lake Swimmers’ from, wait for it, Canada.

• Americans are 32% better at closing than Belgians, but 39% behind their Australian Marketing counterparts at generating quality leads (ones that close).

• The Brits have the highest confidence in their Sales and Marketing teams of all countries, but this appears misplaced, with low closure rates at every stage in the funnel. They nonetheless manage to have the highest focus on new business out of all countries represented in the study.

• Belgians aren’t great at closing, but maintain a ‘steady’ performance through the funnel and no real individual weak spots other than a low proportion of revenueBelgians aren’t great at closing, but maintain a ‘steady’ performance through the funnel and no real individual weak spots other than a low proportion of revenue from new business.

So I know the question you really need to have answered is “how did the Australians go?” You know I’m an Aussie, so you probably want to know how my marketing brethren went down under

In a moment or two I’ll show you how to get a full copy of the alignment report. First I’m going to do two things:

• I’m going to show you how the Aussies went
• I’m going to invite you to receive more blogs like this.

Let’s get to the conclusion first. How did the Australians go with alignment?

Australians are great at starting the conversation (aka ‘Marketing’), with the highest MQL closure rates (28%) and highest SQL closure rates (41%) but Marketing contributes 147% less of the total revenue than for Canadian businesses – perhaps an opportunity to push harder?

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We’ll show you there how you can access the 2014 report, or a webinar I did with the key conclusions, or a more recent webinar my partner Brett Bonser did with one of our Funnel Coaches – Charles Besondy. Or have a complete feast and enjoy them all