I know, I know… the sales / marketing disconnect has been talked and written about for years. The problem now is that we need to fix it. With the rapid market shifts in competitive advantage and strategy, the new oil for salespeople is knowledge. Marketing (and to a degree, product management) has been unfairly tasked with providing this knowledge to sales. I say unfairly tasked because the role of marketing and the agencies that support them is not the granular level of knowledge, in real time, that sales needs to compete and win. Their role is higher level branding and perhaps lead generation. 

One of my partners, Dave Knopfler, is fond of saying "CRM is a tax on salespeople." Really, who likes taxes? I think he's absolutely right. Technology was supposed to help salespeople compete, however, it never fulfilled that promise which is why 74% of organizations report low adoption. For sure it's added some value for management in terms of pipeline management and forecasting (even though average forecast accuracy is still below 50% and the odds at a Vegas craps table are better).  

Both Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company) and the blog strategy+business point to the emergence of "little data," a phrase we began employing a few months ago.

Put yourself in this scenario – you wake up every day for a week feeling unwell, well below par.  You don’t have any broken bones, or spots, or bruises;   you have no visible signs of an illness or injury.  You just don’t feel well.  Eventually you go to the doctor, wait patiently in the doctor’s waiting area, and when it is your turn, take a seat in the doctor’s consulting room.

How would you then feel if the doctor does not talk to you about the reason for your visit?  She (or he) just immediately starts to write a prescription for you.  Rationally we know that this is not the right way to proceed.

During the height of battle, a fighter pilot will have to assess and act upon up to 17 different pieces of information. If you start counting up all the tools, data and information a sales rep may have to deal with – CRM, Business Intelligence Analytics, dashboards, pipeline reports, the buy/sell cycle, marketing automation, discovery research, LinkedIn, networking, calls, appointments, emails, and presentations - it should not be a surprise that sales performance has been impacted negatively.