• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 18, 2023

Some 60% of marketing and sales professionals participating in a survey by the CMO Council do not co-own data and customer strategies.

And 61% of marketers say fragmented technology across marketing, sales and service confines improvements in the alignment of sales and marketing, which many believe is important to succeed.

The report -- Sales & Marketing: Driving Revenue Through Collaboration, released Tuesday -- examines the marketing and sales relationship.

More than 70% of marketers don’t feel very confident in the sales and marketing model used to sell effectively in the digitalized customer journey, according to findings in the report, produced in partnership with KPMG LLP.

The report is based on a survey of over 300 marketing across industries and geographies.

It also includes interviews with marketing and sales executives from Teradata, Schneider Electric, Valpak, Capital Group, Cox Business, Brunswick, and other firms.

What are the various marketing activities that sales actively get involved in? Here are the top five answers:

• 63% - customer segmentation and targeting
• 60% - marketing strategy and planning
• 54% - building alliances and partnerships
• 53% - account-based marketing
• 50% - lead management

What are the various sales activities that marketers are actively involved in? Here are the top five answers:

• 61% - sales enablement
• 61% - upselling and cross-selling
• 50% - sales strategy and planning
• 47% - account planning
• 47% - opportunity management

Some 53% of respondents participating in the survey plan to focus on integrating data across customer journeys in the next 12 months.

Only 40% of marketers say they use co-ownership techniques, while 25% say customer data is owned in silos by marketing and sales and more than 40% of marketers say data control residing elsewhere in the organization is a main barrier to data access.

When asked to cite the top four sales and marketing alignment initiatives that better support the digitized customer journey, 71% cited collaboration to achieve business objectives on things like revenue and customer acquisition. Some 60% cited collaboration on marketing and sales campaigns that drive lead generation. Some 56% cited defining shared key performance indicators (KPIs) for marketing and sales, and 50% said collaborating on customer personas.

These four sales and marketing initiatives aim to better support the digitalized customer journey and self-reliant buyer, according to the report.

Companies are investing in technology to improve collaboration. Some 70% are using automation, resources and workflow management platforms, while 50% are tapping into unified analytics and reporting, 36% are using real-time personalization, and 39% are looking at enterprise data warehouses or customer data platforms.