B2B marketing and sales efforts are rarely aligned to the same audiences, leading to adverse business effects, according to research from the B2B Institute.
An analysis from LinkedIn measured the targeting overlap between sales and marketing across 7,046 B2B organisations and found the average alignment was just 16%.
Why alignment matters
Outlining the research in Marketing Week, Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, heads of research and development at the B2B Institute, explain that ideally marketing and sales activity should form two concentric circles, with marketing by far the bigger circle.
In other words, the degree of overlap is 100%. “B2B marketing and sales should talk to the same buyers,” they write. “When the circle of marketing and the circle of sales intersect, B2B businesses get to experience the ‘circles of boom’.”
But that is rarely happening. And they additionally caution that marketing itself is misaligned, with only an average 5% overlap between top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel marketing strategies.
Takeaways
When sellers reach out to buyers who have been exposed to marketing within the last 30 days, B2B buyers are, on average, 19% more likely to accept a connection request from sales.
Those figures can be significantly higher depending on category: buyers in financial services, for example, are 56% more likely to connect with a seller when they see marketing within 30 days.
High alignment can increase marketing-generated revenue by 208% and increase customer retention by 36%, while also reducing sales and marketing expenses.
