by Sarah Kelleher 
This great HBR article from 1989 highlights that automating marketing and sales processes to improve the relationship and productivity is by no means a new concept. Successful businesses have been trying to improve efficiency and process management between these two key departments for decades!
So why is it still such a challenge to get sales and marketing teams working together? One of the most prevalent issues is lack of a common goal. Marketing are challenged with many and varied targets; raising newsletter engagement rates, improving paid media conversions, generating higher number of leads etc., whereas sales targets are more generally revenue driven.
When these goals don’t align, neither team is particularly motivated to support the other. A much better target focuses on measures that everyone can contribute to. Examples such as shorter sales cycles and higher lead-to-opportunity conversion rates will help both sales and marketing work together towards a common goal and buy in to the CRM and Marketing Automation processes that help them achieve this.
It’s by no means a new concept, but with so many tools to help sales and marketing work together, building an efficient and productive relationship is now easier than ever before.
Increasing marketing productivity even a small amount can have a great impact on the bottom line. MSP systems have a double punch because they can reduce fixed costs and variable costs. Lower fixed costs mean lower breakeven points. So a given percentage increase in sales produces a correspondingly larger increase in operating profits, as the chart on the next page shows. Meanwhile, lower variable costs mean that every sale contributes more to the bottom line. Indeed, because lower variable costs make the slope of the new contribution curve steeper, the absolute size of the financial advantage continues to grow as sales rise.