A growing crisis in B2B marketing is the lack of alignment between marketing and sales teams, as revealed by a recent LinkedIn analysis. This disconnect, coupled with insufficient brand advertising budgets, highlights a critical issue that B2B CMOs must address to ensure organisational success.
Imagine a company meeting where the CEO asks, “What should be the relationship between our marketing and sales efforts?” To illustrate the issue, you draw two circles on a whiteboard. The first circle represents the audience reached by your marketing team, while the second represents the audience targeted by your sales team. The ideal size of these circles is up for debate, but a reasonable assumption is that the marketing circle should be approximately 20 times larger than the sales circle. This discrepancy makes sense because marketing’s role is to engage 100% of potential buyers within a category—both the 5% of buyers who are actively in-market and the 95% who are not ready to buy but may be interested in the future. On the other hand, the sales team should focus on converting the 5% of in-market buyers, as attempting to sell to those not ready to purchase is a fruitless endeavour.
However, the real challenge isn’t just the size of these circles but rather the degree of overlap between them. Ideally, these circles would perfectly overlap, with marketing priming the entire audience and nurturing leads that sales convert into customers. In such a scenario, the flow from marketing to sales would be seamless, creating a powerful, integrated approach to customer acquisition.
The harsh reality, however, is that this ideal alignment is far from common. On average, across all companies studied, the overlap between marketing and sales efforts is a mere 16%. This means that in most cases, the marketing and sales circles resemble disjointed entities rather than the concentric circles they should be. The degree of overlap varies slightly by region and sector, with North America averaging 18% and Latin America and Asia Pacific doing slightly better at 20%. Meanwhile, in EMEA, the figure drops back down to 16%. By industry, the overlap is highest in technology at 19% and lowest in manufacturing at a dismal 8%.
This lack of alignment has profound implications for business performance. When marketing and sales efforts do align, the results can be significant. For example, in the financial services industry, buyers are 56% more likely to engage with a seller if they’ve seen marketing content within the past 30 days. This likelihood of engagement drops considerably if the exposure is not recent, emphasising the importance of consistent brand advertising. Furthermore, when buyers are exposed only to lead-generation messaging without any brand advertising, engagement likelihood plummets to 43%. This highlights the critical role of brand marketing in priming potential buyers.
Brand marketing vs. demand generation
As troubling as the misalignment between marketing and sales is, an even bigger issue looms within the marketing function itself. In many B2B organisations, there is a significant disconnect between brand marketing and demand generation—both of which are essential for a successful marketing strategy. Companies often underinvest in brand marketing, resulting in a ‘brand circle’ that is disproportionately small compared to the ‘demand circle.’ Ideally, brand marketing should have a broader reach, influencing a larger audience and enhancing the effectiveness of demand generation efforts.
The lack of coordination between brand and demand marketing efforts is even more concerning. According to research, the average overlap between the audiences targeted by these two functions is a mere 5%. This represents a significant missed opportunity, as studies show that brand marketing can enhance direct response performance by two to ten times—provided that brand and demand strategies are aligned and reach the same audience.
The “Circles of Doom” and Their Impact on B2B Organisations
This misalignment—aptly termed the ‘circles of doom’—creates a profound sense of unease among B2B marketing and sales leaders. Instead of operating with a single, integrated funnel that efficiently guides buyers from awareness to purchase, most companies are saddled with three disconnected funnels that rarely intersect. This disconnection leads to significant inefficiencies, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. The situation is not without hope. The problem is solvable, and addressing it can have a substantial impact on business outcomes. LinkedIn’s analysis found that companies with a high alignment between marketing and sales saw a 208% increase in marketing-generated revenue, a 36% boost in customer retention, and reduced overall sales and marketing expenses.
Turning the “Circles of Doom” into “Circles of Boom”
To turn these ‘circles of doom’ into ‘circles of boom,’ B2B organisations can implement two actionable strategies:
Align on Targeting: Marketing and sales teams must collaborate closely on audience targeting. For example, if the sales team is focusing on large pharmaceutical companies in Estonia, marketing must ensure that this segment is included in their campaigns. This requires strategic discussions between senior leaders in both departments, followed by precise execution from their teams. Although this might seem straightforward, it’s often overlooked in many B2B organizations.
Broaden Marketing’s reach: One of the primary reasons for the misalignment between marketing and sales is the hyper-targeting strategy employed by both departments. By narrowing their focus, they inadvertently reduce the chances of overlap. Marketing, with its ability to reach a wide audience, should take the lead in adopting a broader targeting approach. This doesn’t mean marketing should target everyone, but rather everyone who could potentially buy within the category. In the B2B world, this is still a relatively small audience, and targeting broadly isn’t wasteful—it’s essential.
Low overlap between marketing and sales leads to missed opportunities and inefficiencies, but by strategically aligning these efforts, B2B companies can dramatically improve their outcomes. When the circles of influence between marketing and sales align, the result is a powerful synergy that drives growth and success. As the saying goes, low overlap brings sales doom, but high overlap brings sales boom.
