How to demonstrate marketing impact on sales by eliminating data silos

B2B companies with outdated data management capabilities must leverage leading tools to enable better insights on marketing impact.

In brief

• B2B marketing functions need better insights to measure their overall impact, including better access to sales data.
• Data unification is one of the most effective ways to drive better synergies between sales and marketing, which ultimately enable better customer experience.
• Some customer data platforms can help break down silos by providing rapid, real-time customer insights that unlock real value.

Many organizations are prioritizing updating their data collection and analysis capabilities to drive greater internal alignment and generate increased revenue. Business-to-business (B2B) companies are continuously seeking to better connect their sales and marketing functions and identify the most effective touch points.

But unlike the typical business-to-consumer model, where purchasing decisions and conversions from marketing touch points to sales are more directly correlated, B2B organizations often operate in a siloed manner. They therefore must approach marketing attribution with enhanced planning considerations and technical capabilities to integrate sales and marketing. B2B companies must utilize customer data to provide deeper insights to sales teams and develop a clearer picture of marketing impact on sales. These considerations are crucial to both tackling current challenges and seizing future opportunities.

Greater synergies between sales and marketing can enhance the potential value both functions bring to the sales process. Several unique factors must be addressed to enable B2B organizations to collect and analyze robust customer data that adequately supports sales and tracks marketing-influenced revenue: 

1. Siloed and fragmented data systems across the enterprise impede the ability of marketing functions to integrate the customer data needed from sales account teams to accurately measure marketing impact.
2. The relationship between individual customer profiles and the overall client account can be complex for B2B organizations. Customers sometimes serve in multiple roles, including decision-maker, advocate and influencer. This can create challenges in tracking the conversion events of each individual, and aggregation of measurement at the account or opportunity level can be difficult.   
3. The sales life cycle can be long and complex. While digital enticements don’t often lead directly to a sale, they may influence sales results.

Given these challenges, B2B companies often struggle to understand the impact marketing can have on revenue generation. The marketing function has an opportunity to highlight the value it can bring in the sales process, ultimately driving better alignment and an ability to meaningfully participate in generating demand and revenue. With better alignment, B2B marketing teams will be able to widen their focus from brand marketing campaigns to broader organizational impact and efficiencies. 

To improve market attribution, organizations need one centralized repository of information regarding customer activities. If marketers could access, analyze and digest relevant customer data across the entire organization’s ecosystem, they would have more opportunities to develop a deep understanding of their customers’ needs and buying habits, transforming from brand marketers to performance-based marketers. This data is vital because it helps organizations determine where and how to spend their marketing dollars to deliver more personalized B2B customer experiences. 

Accessing and utilizing customer data in the right way is a significant differentiator for both sales and marketing functions. Integrating data from the two functions can help marketing surface digital signals that can be reported back to the sales team. At the same time, marketers can generate metrics that help them articulate to the sales team how they were involved in the sales effort. Connecting the dots between sales and marketing empowers sales teams by providing transparency into marketing campaigns and interactions, enabling both sales and marketing to develop more meaningful campaigns.

Customer data platforms can be helpful for B2B organizations that lack proper data storage by aggregating data into a meaningful and usable structure with actionable, real-time customer profiles and segments. For example, Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) was created to centralize and standardize customer data across the enterprise to drive real-time personalized experiences across any channel. The platform functions as a data foundation for customer experience management. Like other customer data platforms, it utilizes data lakes and data warehouses to store customer data. One unique AEP feature, however, is its ability to process high volumes of data at high speeds and in real time. This capability helps B2B organizations fine-tune the customer experience before these insights become outdated or stale.

By implementing AEP, the EY organization is leveraging unified customer data to build a bridge between sales and marketing. With sales tools and dashboards, sales teams have visibility into which client contacts have provided marketing consent, and which are included or engaged with marketing campaigns. Additionally, by leveraging the tool’s customer journey analytics capability, marketers can evaluate cross-channel analytics data to report on marketing-influenced revenue, which quantifies sales opportunities that were influenced by marketing during the course of a sales pursuit. These new capabilities are leading to enhanced collaboration between our sales and marketing teams around coordination, pipeline data hygiene and performance.   

B2B organizations have a wealth of data that can enable the marketing function to create a more impactful experience for customers and create a seamless journey between marketing and sales. Many organizations are developing strategies now to enable better collection and utilization of key information to enable more effective conversion from market awareness to sales opportunity to purchase. By creating an opportunity framework, marketers can better identify their key objectives and the data needed to achieve them. Once this data is appropriately collected, analyzed and harnessed, marketing and sales can work collaboratively to generate new opportunities, accelerate existing opportunities and turn opportunities into new clients.