How Martech & Salestech Can Help Improve Organizational Efficiency & Collaboration

Published: April 13, 2021

The digital transformation of B2B has given rise to new technology solutions that help address challenges with the virtual buyer’s journey. While all marketers leverage martech to operate efficiently, many organizations are missing out on the potential of harnessing both martech and salestech.

Instead of treating martech and salestech as opposites, organizations are relying on the solutions simultaneously to overhaul their internal processes and speed up the buyer’s journey. With both marketers and salespeople adopting new forms of tech, it seems all organizations are moving toward a more unified buying process.

“Digital transformation is not about technology; it’s about reimagining business processes and then applying technology to those reimagined processes,” said Art Harding, COO of People.ai, a revenue operations (RevOps) and intelligence platform, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “The right way for us to think about martech and salestech is that it is all on a convergence path where the go-to-market buyer and customer journey is being reimagined for more seamless operations.”

Harding offered some insights into the modern B2B tech space, highlighting the developing relationship between marketing and sales tools and how both orgs can benefit from their supposed opposite.

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Increasing Operational Efficiency By Aligning Marketing & Sales Technology

The relationship between marketing and sales has always been a rocky one, with many organizations citing problems with misinformation, conflicting mindsets and siloed datasets and assignments. However, the move toward internal alignment has allowed marketers and salespeople to build more streamlined processes using both sales and marketing solutions.

“Marketing should be viewing salestech as an extension of something they’re already doing, and vice versa,” Harding explained. “Everyone needs to understand that the business process that they thought was theirs, whether it be sales, marketing or DevOps, is actually just a mid-step of someone else’s process.”

Harding explained that when marketing and sales leaders make a more concerted effort to work closely with one another, the technology solutions both teams are implementing should complement one another. Three specific ways martech and salestech can work together to create greater efficiency include:

  • Strategic planning – Sales and marketing teams are leveraging martech and fueling their salestech databases, which allows the two organizations to share data and insights between teams for greater operational efficiency;
  • Workflow automation – Both martech and salestech help marketers and salespeople build alignment by simplifying their workloads, finding active leads for nurturing and closing deals to drive revenue; and
  • Data governance – Collaboration between martech and salestech also allows marketers and salespeople to hold each other accountable for the data being leveraged in their specific processes, reducing the number of errors and optimizing their ability to reach, engage and satisfy their buyers.

“What I’m seeing with sales and martech is innovative and creative marketing and sales leaders who want to reimagine how the two departments work together, and how they can rethink roles and responsibilities,” said Harding. “Salestech and martech have introduced the potential to help them refine their organizational structures using the tools to better operationalize their go-to-market strategies.”

Leveraging Marketing & Sales Technology To Improve Collaboration

The tools marketers and salespeople are using to help them through the buyer’s journey also have the potential to improve internal collaboration. When both salestech and martech are treated as steps in an overall process, organizations can encourage internal alignment.

Harding explained that marketers and salespeople are now using martech and salestech interchangeably to measure their ABM campaign performance and RevOps efficiency, which allows both teams to point out areas for improvement and overhaul each other’s workflows. This encourages marketers and salespeople to collaborate and ensure no important data falls through the cracks, new accounts are mapped, accounts are satisfied and revenue is generated.

“The workflows and the data need to be integrated to get the best possible results,” said Harding. “If RevOps says, ‘We need revenue-recognition compliance,’ martech should be able to confirm this. If marketing says, ‘We invested all this money in ABM, we need to make sure that the reps are following up on it,’ salestech should be able to provide signals and answers back to those people about their workflows.”

The Mindset Comes Before The Tool

Harding cautioned against prioritizing martech and salestech over the business process, as that would result in leaders using the tools outside their intended purpose and causing greater confusion with tool sprawl.

Marketing and sales leaders should fully understand what each solution in their organization’s martech and salestech stacks are capable of and avoid stretching them beyond their capabilities. Harding suggested creating a “roadmap” of what each solution is capable of and its role in business operations, as well as how employees should use it. This, he said, will help teams better manage their solutions and maintain internal collaboration and efficiency.

“We need to avoid putting the tech ahead of the capability,” said Harding. “A good marketing/sales leader should have a capabilities roadmap where they can talk about things like new routing, account management, territory and planning tools, and have a roadmap of how their capabilities are going to be delivered to the business.”

Martech and salestech can help teams improve operational efficiency and encourage collaboration. It’s important to understand the roles of each marketing and sales tool in the organization and how both sides of the digital buyer’s journey can benefit from both solution types, as long as teams don’t overstep the technologies’ capabilities.

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