Teamwork makes the dream work. It’s true in sports, and it’s true in business: When teams work together, outcomes improve.
For businesses, sales and marketing alignment is one of the most important connections to get right out of the gate. To help your business better use this “smarketing” approach, we’ve collected some of the best sales marketing alignment research statistics to help capture the state of smarketing in 2023 — and to help encourage collaboration.
Sales and Marketing Alignment Stats to Know
Smarketing Benefits and Opportunities
- 40.4% of sales professionals said sales and marketing became more aligned in 2022 from 2021. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 22.1% of salespeople said the biggest benefit of sales and marketing teams being more aligned was it helped them close more deals. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 20.3% of marketing sales teams said increased win rates were the biggest benefit of sales and marketing alignment. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 44.8% of marketers said sales and marketing alignment became more important in 2022. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 79% of sales professionals said their CRM moderately or extremely improves their sales and marketing alignment. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between sales and marketing enables critical business growth. (LinkedIn, 2020)
- Almost all (94%) of the top-performing salespeople surveyed by LinkedIn called the marketing leads they receive either “excellent” or “good.” (LinkedIn, 2020)
- 30% of marketers using an account-based (ABM) approach reported 2x more engagement with C-level target audiences. (LinkedIn, 2020)
- 76% of B2B marketers say ABM-based approaches deliver a higher ROI than other marketing efforts. (BrightTALK, 2022)
- 62% of teams used ABM to align sales and marketing and win over customers in 2021. In 2022, 33% of businesses plan to start using this tactic. (HubSpot, 2021)
Smarketing Tactics
- 50.6% of sales professionals said tracking and organizing data with a CRM became more crucial. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 65.3% of salespeople said product demos were the most effective sales enablement content. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 30.9% of sales leaders said establishing trust and rapport with prospects became more crucial between 2021 and 2022. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 41.6% of sales professionals said sharing customer feedback is the most important for aligning sales and marketing. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 86% of marketing professionals spend their efforts on accounts that sales are targeting. (LinkedIn, 2020)
- 85% of marketers with a service level agreement (SLA) think their marketing strategy is effective. (HubSpot, 2022)
- The most common measurement of success for content marketing programs is Total Sales. (HubSpot, 2022)
- From July 2021 to June 2022, the search volume for ABM increased by 25% to 100K searches per month. (SimilarWeb, 2022)
Smarketing Challenges & Needs
- 52.2% of sales professionals said the biggest impact of sales and marketing team misalignment is lost sales and revenue. (HubSpot, 2022)
- Only 9.1% of salespeople said leads they received from marketing were very high quality. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 41.7% of sales professionals said they need higher quality leads most from their marketing teams. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 38.3% of sales leaders cited better alignment on goals and strategy as their top priority from their marketing teams. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 17.9% of sales teams cited a need for more high-quality leads as their biggest challenge in the sales process. (HubSpot, 2022)
- Only 37.2% of companies have sales enablement teams as of 2022. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 16.1% of prospects back out of deals because the sales process needs to be personalized more. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 60% of global respondents in a LinkedIn survey believed that misalignment between Sales and Marketing could damage financial performance. (LinkedIn, 2020)
- 90% of sales and marketing professionals point to a number of disconnects across strategy, process, content, and culture. (LinkedIn, 2020)
- Only 28% of salespeople said marketing was their best source of leads. (HubSpot, 2022)
- Only 23.1% of sales professionals said sales and marketing are strongly aligned. (HubSpot, 2022)
- 76% of marketing teams said they’re unsure how best to align with sales. (StrategicAMB, 2022)
- 66% of sales and marketing teams have trouble finding the right budget for ABM. (StrategicAMB, 2022)
Empowering Sales Marketing Alignment
Sales and marketing alignment is crucial to brand success. Creating a reciprocal relationship between these teams can enhance lead generation, improve lead quality, and make it easier for teams to connect with customers.
Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in April 2015, but was updated in September 2020 and May 2023 for comprehensiveness and freshness.
