United they stand, divided they fall—so says a study from Televerde.
While 100% of the study’s respondents agree that it’s “very important” to communicate with other departments about customer engagement, upwards of 61% of sales and marketing departments aren’t aligned around their company’s customer engagement strategy—illuminating how the customer hand-off between sales and marketing still isn’t clear.
Analysis paralysis also appears to be a challenge. Indeed, 79% of respondents say they value customer data from other departments; however, the data they value most is statistical information. The report further states how the rise of big data can result in there being too much data to sift through, making it difficult to coordinate information. In addition, many companies don’t have the tools in place to fathom the data. In fact, only a little more than half of the respondents say they have a solution in place to interpret customer data.
“The continued growth in the amount of data available means that a mashup of various sources of data, including relevant customer information from sales and marketing and other areas that touch the customer, is now critical in delivering a successful customer model,” says Jim Hooker, CEO of the marketing and sales solution provider. “That’s why Televerde is working with existing clients to help companies put a strategy behind all the customer information they are seeing and amassing.”
Despite the advance in digital communication tools, the “human touch” element continues to be coveted in the customer lead-to-revenue process. In fact, 74% of respondents say that it’s more important than ever.
Clearly, marketers face their fair share of challenges: With the myriad of data coming from digital communication, the growing importance of the human touch, and the constant evolution of buyer preferences, best practices are hard to establish.
“What’s needed is a strong lead-to-revenue process to identify areas for improvement and for more effective pipeline management. Managing customer engagement is mission-critical to maintain and build upon established relationships and extend the sales and marketing pipeline,” Hooker says.
*Exact Data deployed a stratified, random sampling of 50,000 surveys targeted to sales and marketing professionals. Of the 1,376 that expressed interest in the survey, the data collected represents the following titles: managers (54%), directors (30%), vice presidents (11%), and executives (5%). Strategic insights were received at the vice president- and executive-level at 16%. Tactical insights were received at the director- and manager-level at 84%.
