The findings, which were unveiled at the launch of the Randstad Sales & Marketing Alignment Report, found that a third (33%) of those polled said their companies have no plans to implement any formal programmes for unifying the two functions. Only 8% say they intend to integrate teams in the future.
Ruth Jacobs, managing director of Randstad sales, marketing and retail, said that British businesses “continue to suffer from a seemingly unbridgeable divide between their marketing and sales teams – a gap that undermines the efforts of the crucial corporate functions necessary to generate demand, capture revenue and gain a competitive advantage.
“Management needs to be educated about where and how marketing should be supporting both the go-to-market process and every step of the lead generation, qualification, and closing cycle.”
The researchers found that when it comes to reporting and effective data analysis the UK is lagging behind US competitors. Over the five years from 2009 to 2014 there were 10,000 articles mentioning big data in the UK. Meanwhile, there were 84,000 in the US over the same period. The profile of big data in the UK has increased much later than in the US, with 82% of those articles appearing in the last two years, compared to 76% in the US.
“We all understand that the customer must be at the centre of any organisational relationship. But as far as sales professionals are concerned the UK’s marketing community has been slow to embrace big data,” said Jacobs.
“A common digital location to record business information is just the first step in bridging the entrenched divide between the two camps," she added. "But there are plenty of other tools at our disposal now to fuse the two streams of information, which can help overcome long-held culture biases, poor reporting and siloed operations.”
