B2B teams are sitting somewhere between “good” and “very good” when it comes to their alignment on go-to-market initiatives, according to a report [download page] from Dun & Bradstreet. Most are fairly confident that their go-to-market teams are aligned and working with shared data for a common view of accounts, per the findings.
Past research has indicated that B2B marketers’ biggest go-to-market priority is better alignment with sales. To some extent respondents to this latest survey – 600 B2B sales, marketing and data executives – feel good about their alignment, though they could improve. On the one hand, half rated the transparency of objectives/goals/strategy shared across sales, marketing and customer teams as perfect (17%) or very good (32%), but on the other hand, half rated this transparency as either just good (29%), average (19%), or bad (3%).
Likewise, there’s a fairly even split in ratings for go-to-market teams working cohesively and in harmony without finger-pointing and mistrust, with 52% saying they do this perfectly or very well, and the remaining almost-half saying they are either good, average, or bad at this. The same general pattern is witnessed for ratings of alignment of business metrics/KPIs among teams and alignment on revenue targets across sales, marketing and customer teams.
Overall, 18% share said that their sales and marketing teams are all working from the same view of data, while 20% share said they’re getting there, and 20% that they have a long way to go. The remaining respondents have yet to start aligning teams around consistent account data.
Despite this range of maturity on go-to-market alignment, virtually all (97% of) respondents consider alignment of teams very important (60%) or somewhat important (37%) to the success of their account-based marketing (ABM) programs.
The top challenge standing in the way of aligning go-to-market teams is data quality (in line with other research on this topic). Poor data quality negatively impacts go-to-market activities in a number of ways, most commonly in difficulties generating customer insights and intelligence based on analytics, and in personalizing content and messaging.
Other Survey Highlights:
- The top go-to-market objective for respondents in the year ahead is to capture more first-party data.
- Supply chain challenges are currently the biggest obstacle to meeting sales and marketing objectives, but respondents figure that inflation will be the biggest challenge in the year ahead.
- Almost 9 in 10 respondents say that their overall business performance is still being very much (30%) or somewhat (56%) impacted by challenges attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Among the 64% who are currently utilizing an account-based strategy, budget is cited as the top hurdle to ABM success.
About the Data: The results are based on a survey of 600 marketing, sales, data, and operations leaders across the US, UK and Canada at B2B or both B2B-and-B2C companies with at least 100 employees
