What are the challenges to sales and marketing alignment?
How to overcome people, process and platform challenges to achieve alignment…
Today, I explore the challenges automotive brands face when trying to implement sales and marketing alignment.
So far in what will be a six-part blog series, I’ve shared my view on what sales and marketing alignment means to the automotive industry and why brands should strive for it. However, the reality of trying to implement alignment can be daunting.
It requires people, processes and technology platforms to work together. Multiple stakeholders and departments – beyond just marketing and sales – must collaborate across the organisation to ensure its success.
In this article, I’ll focus on the challenges associated with people, processes and platforms specific to the automotive sector. I’ll provide practical advice and steps brands can take to overcome these challenges and achieve sales and marketing alignment.
People.
Automotive sales and marketing teams tend to operate in relative silos, compared to other industries such as software. Most manufacturers, finance companies and dealers will have a Marketing Director and a Sales Director reporting to the Managing Director. Certainly in my experience, they operate as individual functions as opposed to one joined-up, single process, with the joint objective of driving revenue.
Culturally, the departments differ too. Department politics play out, with teams using different language and jargon. The individuals are different too – which causes further friction. And we’ve all heard the jokes and derogatory comments about each department – sales teams calling the marketing team ‘the colouring in brigade’, marketing teams making quips about the sales team being on the golf course.
These structural and cultural issues perpetuate the traditional view of marketing and sales operating in silos – following a linear sales process. Marketing focuses on the top of the funnel, while sales stick to the bottom of the funnel. However, as I’ve covered in my previous articles, with the advent of the connected car and the future of mobility and subscription models, this approach is outdated.
Here’s what automotive brands can do to overcome these cultural and structural issues…
Use simple, consistent language.
Avoid the marketing and sales jargon, which sees things getting lost in translation or worse, ignored altogether due to a lack of shared understanding. It creates barriers and switches people off.
Create partnerships at every level.
Start building bridges between different levels of marketing and sales teams. Encourage them to work together on joint projects and invite each department in to see where they could help each other.
Make it part of their job.
Ultimately, sales and marketing need to become one team – they need to recognise their responsibility to one another. Making this part of their job description and competency framework ensures this behaviour is expected, monitored and measured.
Process.
Sales teams are always held accountable for the sales number, but far too often, marketing departments are allowed to sidestep this responsibility – focusing instead on engagement statistics.
My view has always been that both departments’ KPIs need to be consistent, with both teams equally responsible for sales. Sure, you still want to be able to measure the individual effectiveness of marketing campaigns and sales activity, but it always needs to be linked to the overall sales number.
Given this disconnect in KPIs and the siloed nature of sales and marketing departments mentioned above, it's no surprise they often have separate – sometimes conflicting – strategies.
Between the sales team trying to hit their monthly number and the marketing department running campaigns in every channel, joined-up thinking often goes out the window. Also, over time, strategies change and evolve. And even though everyone may have had the best intentions at the start, these strategies start to diverge as the siloed departments focus on what they think is important – or the things they enjoy doing most.
One of the key reasons for this lack of joined-up thinking is a lack of consistency in customer journeys. Often, a marketing team will have a defined customer journey – prioritising the customer’s mindset at each stage of the purchasing journey. Sales, meanwhile, will have a sales process that focuses on the action they need to take to get the customer to the next stage.
To achieve consistency, automotive brands should look to do the following…
Create a consistent customer journey.
Create a simple customer journey together, mapping sales and marketing responsibilities, customer touchpoints and internal processes into one single, mutually understood process.
Set combined KPIs.
Create a single set of KPIs for the sales and marketing teams to achieve. These should be aligned to your brand’s volume/revenue objectives.
Develop a single sales and marketing strategy.
Come together as a single entity and develop a joint strategy, with a single set of sales and marketing KPIs as the primary objective. As this strategy naturally evolves, make sure you’re coming back together to review and refine.
Platform.
Alignment is nigh on impossible if you don't have the right tools. Many automotive brands' customer data structures are complex, held together with numerous legacy systems, with individual systems doing specific jobs for specific departments.
This means the organisation rarely has a single view of the customer, across sales, marketing and service departments. It makes delivering joined-up sales and marketing activity almost out of the question.
In addition to this, timely, accurate and relevant reporting is a challenge. Analysts spend all their time trying to piece together different data sources (which don't match one another) for sporadic and often vague customer insight. This lack of visibility hampers decision-making and makes diagnosing issues and doing something about them in real-time impossible.
To gain more visibility, automotive brands can…
Build a single view of the customer.
Create a CRM used by sales, marketing and service departments. In this digital and interconnected world that we all live in, your level of insight and ability to make smart decisions in real-time will be invaluable.
Make your CRM intuitive.
Granted, creating a CRM which is both easy to use and able to capture the right level of information is a balancing act. So focus on the data points that really matter and consider their use case and value before asking sales, marketing and service teams to input them. This will lead to much higher usage rates and much richer, consistent data that can be used by all parties.
Build diagnostic reporting.
Use this jointly-created customer journey and single view of the customer to develop diagnostic reporting. Usually, CRM reporting focuses on what happened, and when. However, with a robust diagnostic process, you can also gain insight into the ‘why’.
A final thought.
As I said, sales and marketing alignment can be daunting. However, with such dramatic and rapid change happening in the automotive sector, now is the time to act.
Brands need to change their culture, reimagine and rebuild processes, and completely redesign platforms in order to manage these changes.
The fact of the matter is that a linear marketing and sales process, with a clear point of handover between departments, is no longer relevant for the connected, autonomous, shared and electric future of our industry.
Interested in learning how aligned your sales and marketing teams are? Take our sales and marketing alignment benchmarking quiz and see how you measure up to businesses in your space.
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