Salespeople and marketers: how to work better together?

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Sales acquisition, especially in the B2B world, is extremely difficult. Thus, 96% of prospects conduct their own research - in self-service - before speaking to a sales representative, notes HubSpot, publisher of marketing, sales and customer service software, in its study The keys to sales performance in 2024. Salespeople must therefore reinvent themselves, but their path is strewn with pitfalls. Within many companies, the management of "legacy", these pre-existing software architectures, constitutes a first obstacle to overcome. The difficulties of interfacing and interoperability make the choice of a multifunctional platform more judicious than a concatenation of different software, thus pushing users to break down the barriers between their working practices. An asset to promote inter-professional collaboration. " One of the main problems we observe within companies is the lack of connection between the special database tools and systems used by marketing and sales teams. As a result, they do not have access to the same customer data. In addition, their respective objectives and KPIs are often different. It is therefore necessary to unify all these professionals around data and customer experience so that their expectations are met ," says Virginie Le Lièvre, head of brand and marketing France at HubSpot. But this close collaboration is far from being a given in all organizations.

Different jobs, but the same goal
The lack of alignment between salespeople and marketers costs companies a trillion dollars each year worldwide, says Sébastien Imbert, former marketing director of Microsoft France and founder in the summer of 2023 of the consulting firm ykaria.tech. " Although these functions share a single objective, which is to contribute to the success of their company, they do not get along very well. They do not have the same metrics, they operate differently. This often leads them to work on divergent results ," notes Sébastien Imbert. For the former CMO, when teams are aligned - thanks in particular to real sponsorship from the management committee - it is possible to obtain up to 30% more conversion in the BtoB sector. " During my 5-year term as CMO, I think that 60% of my work consisted of transforming the marketing and sales professions so that they are aligned ," he says.



Between 2018 and 2022, Sébastien Imbert and his teams helped develop three indicators to measure the improvement of the sales process: the marketing engagement index, the marketing insights for sellers and the content seller usage. Microsoft was automating campaigns on priority accounts. With the arrival of AI, the company was able to set up an indicator measuring the level of customer engagement with Microsoft and the marketing actions carried out. The publisher also wanted to ensure that the sales force made good use of this high value-added information. It therefore introduced an element of gamification so that salespeople would use these marketing insights for sellers in their sales approach and their understanding of accounts. " We created a global competition to determine which salespeople were making the best use of these marketing insights. This further developed trust and synergy between the teams. Finally, we developed "content seller usage" to determine which content was shared by salespeople, but also by customers, in order to encourage marketers to produce better content.