The importance of sales and marketing alignment in the automotive sector
Summarising the insight shared in our recent blog series…
Throughout this recent blog series, we’ve explored the importance of sales and marketing alignment in the automotive industry.
This is an industry which is experiencing its biggest period of change and disruption in its 150-year history. As a result, brands are having to evolve and adapt at an ever-increasing pace.
In this series, we’ve covered:
We’ve explained how alignment helps increase sales performance, in our experience by up to 36%. We shared how it can increase efficiency, creating a joined-up coherent process between sales and marketing departments. And as the automotive industry shifts to a subscription / recurring revenue model, we’ve also highlighted the importance of alignment in increasing customer lifetime value.
So for our final post, we’ll round up the key points from this series and provide takeaways that you can put into practice.
What is S&M alignment?
The traditional view is that marketing focuses on the top of the funnel, whilst sales focus on the bottom of the funnel.
Sales and marketing alignment disregards this traditional view, with marketing extending its influence further down the funnel – helping improve the sales process and ongoing customer experience. Sales, meanwhile, is required to support further up the funnel.
Alignment is about sales and marketing working together on each aspect of the sales process to deliver the best customer experience and maximise return.
Digitisation and e-Commerce have blurred the lines of the traditional marketing and sales roles. As consumers, this is something many of us have witnessed and experienced in other industries.
As customers demand better experiences, and the automotive industry continues to digitise the sales process, sales and marketing alignment in the automotive sector is more important than ever.
Why is it important in the automotive sector?
Electrification and connected vehicles
Vehicles are now connected devices, offering functionality that we expect from our phones, not our cars.
This is providing manufacturers with more data on their customers, enabling them to deliver more personal experiences and greater opportunities for recurring revenue.
This means that, for the manufacturer, the sales process is no longer linear. It's no longer about targeting a one-off vehicle sale. It's about acquiring customers and winning loyalty and retention by creating outstanding experiences.
Agency and direct sales
Consumers are buying their food from Ocado, Christmas presents from Amazon and phones from Apple. They expect a seamless digital process. But when buying or leasing a car, they often experience a laborious analogue process.
Automotive manufacturers, finance companies and dealers are developing digital and direct-to-customer (D2C) channels to virtualise the sales process. As a result, virtual sales and account management teams – in addition to e-Commerce platforms – will ultimately replace the role of the traditional face-to-face sale.
Mobility and subscriptions
We have already seen the shift from ownership to leasing over the last 20 years. In the next 10, we will see increased adoption of subscription services.
Mass adoption of mobility will spell the end of the ‘traditional car sale’. It puts pressure on automotive brands to not only sell their service but keep people coming back based on the quality of their experience.
To achieve this, brands need to completely rethink their customer journeys, review their technology requirements and restructure their sales and marketing teams. Automotive brands must shift their focus from selling a product to selling a service.
What are the challenges to S&M alignment?
As part of our blog series, we asked readers to complete our sales and marketing alignment survey. Here’s what we found…
People
The biggest challenge to achieving sales and marketing alignment is people. In our experience, sales and marketing teams in the automotive sector operate in silos, and it proved to be the lowest scoring area of our alignment survey.
In order to break down these silos, brands should:
Use simple consistent language – avoid jargon or anything which leads to messages being lost in translation.
Create partnerships – build bridges between members of the sales and marketing teams (cross-functional projects are a great way to do this).
Make it part of their job – include sales and marketing responsibilities in job descriptions, competency matrices and in their KPIs.
Process
Robust processes are the foundation from which to build an aligned sales and marketing team. In our survey, alignment of processes was the highest scoring area.
To build an aligned process, brands should:
Create a consistent customer journey – map sales and marketing responsibilities, touchpoints and processes into one single process.
Combined KPIs – set joint KPIs for the sales and marketing teams, aligned to your brand’s volume / revenue objectives.
Develop a joint strategy – create a single set of sales and marketing objectives, and as the strategy naturally evolves, make sure you review and refine these together.
Platform
Alignment is nigh-on impossible if you don't have the right tools. Technology is a crucial enabler, making alignment easier and more visible. Technological alignment scored highly in our survey, just 2 percentage points behind process.
To ensure you have the right tools to achieve technological alignment, brands should:
Create a single view of the customer – which both teams work from, giving you an end-to-end view of your prospect and customer experiences.
Make your CRM intuitive – balance the amount of data you think you need with the time required from marketing and sales to gather / input this data.
Build diagnostic reporting – don’t just focus on what happened. Use the insight captured to understand why it happened and what you can do to enhance the customer experience.
A final thought
Sales and marketing alignment has always been important. And as we’ve mentioned throughout this series, automotive brands have seen this as a priority for many years. But today, it’s priceless and achieving alignment is likely to determine the future success of many businesses in this industry.
The key point is, automotive brands must shift from selling a product, to selling a service and an experience. Today, automotive businesses, people, processes and platforms are geared toward selling units. In the future, brands must prioritise delivering exceptional customer experiences.
We hope you found this series useful. If you’d like to hear how Levo can help align your sales and marketing teams, please contact us using the form below.
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