Top B2B Marketing Disconnects That Can Impact the End-to-End Customer Journey

Staff WritersCRMCustomer Experience Management

By Paroma Sen On Oct 11, 2022

B2B marketing or sales disconnects can affect customer relationships and eventually impact potential revenue in the long run. Here are a few internal or external disconnects that could be affecting your marketing goals.

The online marketplace is more competitive that ever today, putting greater emphasis on brands to recreate better online journeys. Building a seamless online buying experience is something that can be achieved easily even by lean teams, given the range of martech automation and eCommerce platforms.

But, the adoption of newer or better martech or associated tools is not the only answer to enhancing and maintaining a seamless buyer journey that helps differentiate your brand from the rest.

The actual fundamental lies in connecting systems, internal processes, external goals while keeping a uniform framework in mind that reiterates on ‘’what a brand’s online buying journey should look like’’.

Different teams and brands will experience a different set of disconnects at various stages of the product or brand lifecycle. The idea is to constantly measure what’s working or not, evaluate what needs attention and why, then implementing the right processes and tools together to help reshape disjointed customer journeys and customer experiences if any.

Here are a few factors to consider if you feel like your online buyer journey could be having too many disconnects:

A Need to Realign Marketing/Sales/Customer Facing Tactics Using a Unified Source of Truth

A brand’s go-to market process or strategy can be severely impacted when different teams are using different platforms to store their data or automate future campaigns or even website triggers (their chat bot, popup, etc).

Even if a brand has different platforms in use, while it is usually advisable to unify processes by having these teams run their campaigns and store their data on a unified CRM or automation tool, for brands that prefer different platforms: a better process has to be put in place where marketing/sales leaders can come together to define what type of GTM strategy or customer journey should be put in place and how before placing prospects into a unified CRM or tool that can allow both teams to align on messaging that drive a more uniform prospect or customer journey.

For brands that have a different popup tool that is collecting information on subscribers and a different chat bot tool that is collecting chat information into a different platform, the need to get this data into a system that allows both, the marketing and sales team to define next-best-steps becomes more crucial, for instance.

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Do Internal Sales and Marketing Processes Not Align with the Intended External Buyer Journey The Brand Wants to Put in Place?

In a martech/sales tech ecosystem that now boasts of far too many tools to choose from, it is important for marketing and sales leaders to not fall for the newest features or capabilities of any of them without evaluating whether they need it or whether their existing tech stack can still allow for the same customer journey and experience to be built out.

Adopting different platforms (like a different live chat tool and then a different one to manage subscriber information) is required in certain types of journeys or brand formats, but the key lies in keeping your tech stack to a minimum and trying to adopt fewer and more integrated systems that can build better internal processes and alignment between sales-marketing-other customer facing teams.

Having a framework in place with an intended flowchart or brand lifecycle can actually help teams adopt the right tools and processes to meet that end goal.

Understanding Where Your Silos Exist

For brands to keep maintaining a seamless journey, constant testing of their website journey and online buying journey becomes more crucial in a competitive market. Wrong links, 404 errors, lack of unity in terms of reaching out website visitors or live chat prospects in time (due to poor martech-sales tech integrations or poor internal processes) are all elements that can drive prospects and customers away.

While marketers and sales teams need to build processes that allow for constant testing and improvements, the other side involves understanding where silos exist and why in terms of response or execution and action times.

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End Note: In a martech/salestech heavy world, it is easier to build seamless customer journeys

The evolution of martech and salestech is meant to drive better customer journeys and experiences, it brands do it right.

The key requirement revolves around constantly measuring the state and effectiveness of your actual buying journey (remember, how secret shoppers work?), evaluating better ways to drive your GTM process while also understanding more on what your customers and prospects want (intuitive experiences).

In a crowded digital environment, the need to create deeper customer connections is important, and not impossible.

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