Business success is about making the connections that others can’t see. These connections are what allow you to carve out your employment niche. Often the answer is much closer to home. So close, in fact, that it seems to occupy an industry blind spot.
Sales and marketing are the two primary ways of interacting with customers – potential or secured. Seemingly different kettles of fish, attracting different types of people with different skillsets, but pursuing the same end-goal: a twentieth-century turf-war between the two was almost inevitable. Sales deals in people, marketing deals in ideas.
Traditionally, these two groups have been separated into different arsenals. But over the past ten years both communities have come to see that they need to work in harmony. However, our report shows, the practice has been very different: the difficult part is getting the right kind of sparks to fly.
Randstad's report reveals:
- Four-fifths (80%) of organisations recognise the benefits of better alignment between sales and marketing
- But two-fifths (40%) of companies haven’t even tried to integrate teams, and still have no formal programmes, systems or processes in place to unify functions
- Companies are held back by siloed operations, corporate culture-bias, organisational structures, lack of management support and ineffective reporting
For solutions on how to overcome the key roadblocks to integrating these two teams, download our report today.