Marketing alignment is as critical as marketing and sales alignment

The issue of reskilling of the marketing team to leverage the Martech-enabled marketing paradigm is a huge area of concern and opportunity for organizations (see Verticurl’s POV on this topic here). Most companies have been unable to handle this issue properly. As Martech moves front and center of most marketing teams, this issue is being manifest in a very interesting way.

Within each organization, some marketers who were comfortable with data and technology automatically leaned towards this Martech-enabled process. They helped companies set up the processes, share the results and create a roadmap. In the initial days of implementation, these results and roadmaps were incremental to the traditional GTM strategy. Hence, they were allowed to do things the way they wanted. However, now most companies have reached a stage where contacts are primarily acquired through inbound technologies, automated/triggered campaigns account for a substantial portion of their revenue and these reports are critical to understanding their ability to hit quarterly KPIs. 

This should come as great news for these early adopters, as their work is recognized and is critical to the business. However, in most companies, these early adopters are struggling. 

They are data-savvy, who believe that the numbers do all the talking – both in terms of identifying the insight and in terms of explaining the business impact. They usually work with agencies who shared a similar profile and hence find data to be a shared language. 

The other big trait that these early adopters share is that of a focus on constant optimization. So, when they look at a report, they try to identify the aspects that they can optimize. 

This is very different from the traits of “mainstream” marketing people. Most marketing people don’t like to look at reports, instead, they want to be told what the insight is. Also, most marketers are used to the “one big campaign per quarter” approach. When they look at a report, they are looking for that one big eureka moment.  

An example of this is a website analytics report. Most marketers move this weekly/monthly report aside (along with logging into the system to analyze this report regularly). This report is used for a website revamp and then kept aside till the next web revamp project comes along, which ignores the fact that a user journey changes daily and hence so should the website.

There could come a stage where all marketers are adept at interpreting a report. However, the companies that manage this change and this alignment between the old and the new ways of marketing will reap an exponential growth rate as compared to that of other organizations. There has been a lot of focus placed on sales and marketing alignment but ensuring an aligned marketing team will prove as crucial. 

These “early adopters” need to be trained on how best to share reports and insights with the larger organization. The mainstream marketers need to be trained on the concept of constant optimization. There needs to be a well-designed change management plan to achieve this objective. 

Verticurl provides various services to help improve this alignment :