Invoca has unveiled a report that highlights the significant impact of misalignment between B2C marketing, sales, and contact center teams on revenue growth. Although 90% of sales and marketing leaders acknowledge the importance of team alignment for revenue growth, a mere 10% report strong alignment within their teams.
The report underscores the clear link between team alignment and revenue outcomes: 86% of companies with well-aligned sales and marketing teams anticipate substantial revenue growth in 2024, compared to only 33% of companies with poorly aligned teams.
"Marketing and sales jointly own revenue, but at most B2C companies, these teams are totally disconnected. This disconnect is all the more damaging in high-touch industries still reliant on human interaction to convert leads, such as healthcare, automotive, or home services. Revenue execution platforms directly address these pain points to foster better collaboration between teams and deliver an improved buyer experience," said Peter Isaacson, CMO at Invoca.
Low trust levels hinder team synergy
Although sales and marketing leaders recognize the critical role of alignment, with 93% noting that low trust between teams hinders revenue growth, a trust deficit persists. Only 19% of marketing leaders express high confidence in their contact center’s ability to convert leads effectively, and just 22% of sales leaders have strong faith in marketing’s capacity to generate high-quality phone leads.
This mistrust leads to poor alignment, impacting revenue-driving teams. The primary obstacles to alignment include mismatched strategies, inadequate data handling, and poor communication, along with a lack of integrated sales and marketing technologies. Without such technologies, sharing data, obtaining a unified customer view, and aligning KPIs and strategies become challenging.
The buying journey visibility issue
The report reveals that poorly aligned teams disrupt the buying journey, leading to subpar buyer experiences. Only 28% of respondents are confident in their understanding of the complete buying journey, partly due to the absence of clear ownership, with 70% indicating no clear ownership within their organization.
However, when marketers have full access to contact center data, their understanding of the buying journey improves by 40%, showing the importance of data alignment between marketing and contact center sales teams.
Challenges in attributing revenue
The study highlights that aligning marketing and contact center sales teams on revenue investments enables better performance proof, smarter optimization, and enhanced revenue growth. While 80% of marketing leaders stress the importance of directly attributing revenue to marketing efforts, 69% struggle with inadequate attribution for phone conversions driven by marketing campaigns.
Only 7% can directly link phone sales revenue to marketing programs, with nearly 25% citing lack of access to contact center data as the main issue. Consequently, around 40% of respondents feel they have little to no control over revenue outcomes, impacting their ability to drive revenue effectively.
Elsewhere, Invoca has added enhancements to Signal AI suite - its conversation intelligence offering - and introduced Signal AI Studio, a new solution that enables businesses to create custom AI models that surface insights from phone conversations.
