Summit 2013 Highlights: The Unified Integration Model for Marketing, Sales and Product Functions
When polled about the state of integration among B2B product, sales and marketing functions within their organizations, 98 percent of Summit 2013 attendees agreed that at least one of those functions was not well integrated with the other two.
Twenty-six percent of those polled said that product functions were not well integrated with sales and marketing, 11 percent said sales was not well integrated, 9 percent said marketing was out of sync, and 53 percent said their companies’ integration problems were generalized across all three functions.
To address these issues, the SiriusDecisions Unified Integration Model was introduced today at Summit 2013 by Jay Gaines, vice president and group director of the B2B research firm.
The new model, Gaines explained, provides a complete framework of processes, capabilities and tools that eliminate disconnects among marketing, sales and product functions in order to meet the needs of B2B buyers and generate revenue more efficiently.
“We often see misalignment among product, marketing and sales functions, causing companies to waste money and time,” Gaines said. “We wanted to create a clear and simple framework to enable organizations to structure their thoughts about how they can start improving performance within these functions as well as how they work together.”
Gaines described how the Unified Integration Model works for nine specific marketing, sales and product functions to establish a shared understanding of goals, processes, measurements and market perspectives. The model links each of these functions to specific SiriusDecisions frameworks and tools that can be used by B2B organizations to improve the performance and alignment of that function.
“We don’t expect any company to address every single aspect of the model,” Gaines noted. “Each organization should choose what it needs, based on its priorities and current state.”
To help companies choose which areas of concern to address first, Gaines also introduced the SiriusDecisions Unified Integration Maturity Assessment Framework, which scores the maturity of key performance and alignment areas for each sales, marketing and product function.
Gaines concluded by stating that marketing leaders must take the initiative to engage their product and sales counterparts to start making positive changes to improve cross-functional alignment.
“Marketing is always the function at greatest risk of becoming irrelevant if these functions don’t work well together,” Gaines said.