“Revenue Marketing Report” finds that internal relationships are key to companies top lines, yet nearly half of professionals still don’t feel they’re well aligned

A research report released from Outfunnel, a revenue marketing automation platform, and Copper, the Google-recommended CRM for businesses that grow strong through relationships, found that companies where sales and marketing teams cooperate effectively are 70% more likely to see revenues grow year over year.

The Revenue Marketing Report 2021 sheds light on the state of sales and marketing alignment in SMBs and examines the strategies and tactics that the top performing companies—those seeing revenues increase year over year—practice to stay successful.

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Key findings from the Revenue Marketing Report 2021 report include:

1. Nearly half of sales and marketing professionals still don’t feel they are well-aligned. 46% of respondents rate the quality of communication between the teams as ‘Poor,’ ‘Fair’ or ‘Good,’ and 45% rate their alignment of goals with the same low-to-average terms. Company size plays a role here; SMBs with 51-100 employees are less confident about alignment than smaller and larger subgroups.

2. Sales and marketing teams’ attitudes towards each other reveal disagreement regarding each other’s contributions. Nearly half (46%) of marketers feel that their sales counterparts don’t understand what’s important to the marketing team. Sales teams have slightly more confidence, with less than one third (31%) perceiving a disconnect between the two teams.

3. Companies with seamless sales and marketing collaboration see more revenue growth than organizations with ineffective sales and marketing alignment. Revenue growth is 70% more common among companies where sales and marketing cooperate effectively. The survey found the best form of alignment is when both teams cooperated on strategic and tactical initiatives, like executive buy-in, regular joint meetings and shared KPIs.

4. More than one third of respondents are dissatisfied with the tech available for aligning sales and marketing teams. 36% of respondents rate the usefulness of sales tech and martech tools as poor or average. Nearly half of all respondents (47%) agree that these tools would be more useful if they could be easily integrated, and 40% agree they’d be more useful if they would be more affordable.

5. More than half of B2B companies report that the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on their revenues and on aligning sales and marketing. 51% of the respondents reported that COVID-19 had a strong or somewhat negative impact on their company’s revenue. 53% of respondents agreed that the pandemic has made it more difficult to align sales and marketing goals.

“The dysfunctional relationship between sales and marketing is hurting business’ top lines,” said Dennis Fois, CEO of Copper. “It’s clear that companies still have a lot to do to improve their internal relationships, both for alignment and revenue-driving purposes. Taking the time to build, foster and maintain relationships between sales and marketing teams is now more important than ever as buyers are engaging sales later in the buying process. Focusing on relationship dynamics will help companies operate more effectively internally and in turn, better service their customers and create high-value engagements.”

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The importance of technology was another focus of the report, as Outfunnel and Copper look to bridge the gaps between sales and marketing. “The ever-increasing number of sales and marketing tools are useful for aligning sales and marketing. However, these tools are too expensive for many SMBs and nearly half of respondents agree they’d be more useful if integrating the tools would be easier,” said Andrus Purde, co-founder and CEO of Outfunnel.

To prepare the report, Outfunnel and Copper surveyed 300 sales and marketing leaders from SMBs across industries in December of 2020. Nearly half of the respondents (47%) worked at companies with 10-50 employees, 36% worked at companies with 51-100 employees and 17% at companies with 101-150 employees.

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