What are the strategic complexities leaders create with under investment in marketing automation support, sales enablement, data, and AI support.  This 7th in our series video builds on Part 6 in the Full Funnel Mandate Series where we discussed the daily challenges under investment creates for marketers and sales reps.

(Watch Time – 3:30)

Summary

What are the strategic challenges and complexities that marketing and sales leaders create when they under invest in marketing automation, sales enablement, data, and AI support. This video addresses issues around AI implementations, ROI measurement, HR and strategic planning. The video builds on Part 6 in the series where we discussed the daily challenges under investment creates for marketers and sales reps.

Transcript

What Are The Strategic Complications Marketing and Sales Leaders Create When They Under Invest in Marketing Automation, Sales Enablement, Data, and AI Support?

Tactical Barriers That Escalate Into Strategic Challenges

In part 6, we discussed the type of automation, data, and sales enablement support your existing team needs for success, in detail the daily challenges, and tactical barriers you create for them by not staffing and funding the appropriate level of support. And these tactical barriers caused by ignoring or underinvesting in marketing automation also create strategic challenges for sales and marketing leadership, especially if you’re committed to accelerated funnels and the financial rewards possible with mature automation. In the short term, these tactical issues accumulate to create strategic bottlenecks and discrete ROI consequences at specific areas of your funnel, making it difficult to provide sales with higher quality leads to hit quarterly and annual revenue targets.

Sales Enablement Gaps Undermine Strategic Alignment and Customer Lifecycle Growth

Lack of sales enablement tools makes it difficult for marketing to work towards the strategic alignment required to support accelerated sales funnels that increase productivity, and marketing struggles to adapt and extend campaigns to support the entire customer life cycle, missing out on all the potential incremental sales, cost efficiencies, and overall account gains possible.

Fragmented Technology and Process Silos Limit Tech Stack ROI

So both in the short term and long term, you have fragmented technology and process silos, which makes it impossible to maximize your tech stack investments in addition to impacting your brand, media, and top of funnel spends.

The AI and Automation Acceleration Is Only Just Beginning

And as both Mark Cuban and Gartner have recently pointed out, although things are already moving fast, we are only in the 1st innings of the preseason leveraging the future of automation and AI. And CMOs and sales leaders are about to quickly experience an acceleration of additional strategic issues. First, CMOs will continue to struggle measuring marketing’s contribution and impact on sales, putting themselves and their team at risk because strategic marketing and sales alignment will remain out of reach. And without establishing and maintaining clean, unified data with the right data plumbers and automation process expertise, it will become increasingly difficult to scale, data driven buyer understanding, customer life cycle and scenario planning, accurate sales and spend forecasts, long term personalization, and AI beyond the most basic and fragmented LLMs, and machine learning that you can trust.

Burnout and Talent Attrition: The Hidden Cost of Underfunded Tech Support

Finally, according to both Harvard Business Review and Marketing Week, burnout will continue to plague marketing teams with daily productivity decreases of as much as 30% and top talent attrition increasing by as much as 2.5x as they move to more mature organizations with better funded tech support, which long term, in some cases, can almost double as CMO’s fully loaded recruiting, staffing, and training headcount costs.

Part 6 in our Full Funnel Mandate Video Series addresses the challenges teams face without marketing automation, sales enablement, data, and AI support. A small investment in the right support allows teams to quickly become competitive with mature automated organizations and to achieve significant ROI.

(Watch Time – 5:00)

Summary

This video addresses the challenges teams face when they lack proper marketing automation, sales enablement, data, and AI support. This creates significant barriers including team burnout, time wasted troubleshooting errors, lack of clean data for insights and reporting, and struggles with sales-marketing alignment.  A small investment in the right support allows teams to quickly become competitive with mature automated organizations and to achieve significant ROI.

Transcript

What challenges do teams face without proven marketing automation, sales enablement, data, and AI support?

The Hidden Cost of Under-Resourcing Your Salesforce Admin

We’ve established that success alignment in mature automation now requires a dramatically increased content and campaign workload supporting both the go to market and customer funnels, deploying multiple skills and daily execution from strategy and creative to optimizing and managing tech stacks, and the implementation of multiple new processes and tools. So what are the top barriers and limitations that you create for your team when you only fund a Salesforce admin and don’t also supply the required automation and sales enablement support they need.

Burnout and Loss of Focus Across Your Marketing Team

The first barrier you create is that you limit your team’s ability to focus on top priorities and diminish their passion, which is leading to increased burnout across your marketing organization. This burnout is happening at historic rates with multiple negative impacts. And at a high level, fifty percent of marketers state they feel overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted due to this constant pressure to innovate and produce, especially while trying to do more with less.

The Tech Overload Factor Overwhelms Team and Hurts Productivity

And the time spent managing these technologies is both a direct and indirect contributor to this constant pressure for two reasons. Fifty five percent of these marketers feel overwhelmed and distracted by the number of tools they need to learn, master, and manage, and close to seventy five percent blame the lack of focused work time on their primary functions as their top reason for feeling overwhelmed. Ultimately, very few professionals that get into marketing and sales do it because they’re passionate about managing tech stacks and becoming plumbers for data and system optimizations. So beyond decreasing your team’s focus on top priorities, this lack of automation support also diminishes your team’s overall value and strength with four additional compounding tactical and technical barriers that continue to accumulate over time.

Poor Implementation Hurts Short Term Results and Creates a Broken Foundation for Long Term Success

First, without a clean implementation as a solid foundation, your team wastes time troubleshooting system errors and broken automations. They can’t turn great strategies into daily tactics and great content into automated buyers’ journeys, and this negatively impacts your buyer experience and brand.

Lack of Optimization Leaves Powerful Features Unused

Then after the initial implementation, most organizations don’t know what they don’t know. Teams lack a resource with the proven knowledge base to optimize technology and effectively customize specific processes. They don’t use the appropriate software features, apply the right data workflows, and deploy best practice automations for lead nurturing, trade shows and events, account based marketing and personalization, triggered conversions, and you can’t support revenue growth with adoption, upsell, cross sell, and retention campaigns. Without optimization, you struggle to create higher quality leads and your team’s hard work, lead gen efforts, and top of funnel spend across channels are not maximized.

Dirty Data Undermines Insights, Reporting, and AI

Next, with that proven data governance support, your teams will lack the clean and unified data they need for competitive insights and the ability to create accurate and reliable dashboards and reporting, buyer personas, look alikes, marketing and content attribution, return on marketing investment. In long term, you’ll struggle with advanced AI deployments.

Sales and Marketing Misalignment Caps Your Revenue Potential

Finally, as you transition buyers back and forth between marketing and sales, you’ll struggle with alignment and never maximize the full potential of your entire tech stack because you will struggle to enable sales on a daily basis with lead scoring, prioritized call list, triggered buyer intent alerts, prospect intelligence, daily activity tracking and recommendations, additional third party integrations, micro campaigns, and full adoption of all the tools Salesforce offers to increase productivity.

The Good News: Most Teams Are Closer Than They Think

So while it can seem daunting to get all the right parts required for success assembled in the right order, it’s important to remember that most teams already have eighty percent of the tools and talent they need. So with a small investment in the right support, most teams can quickly become competitive with even the most mature organizations that are in the process of automating eighty percent of the sales and customer funnel. And with this support, your team can ultimately achieve the ROI and cost savings, automation, sales enablement, effective AI, and clean data now make possible.

This video (Part 5 in our Full Funnel Mandate Video Series) discusses the marketing support required for Automation and Sales Ennoblement success.

(Watch Time – 5:30)

Summary

What are the different types of support required for Automation and Sales Enablement Success for both short term results and long term foundational success?

This video (Part 5 in our Full Funnel Mandate Video Series) discusses the critical need for specialized marketing automation and sales enablement support for B2B organizations. It explains why organizations struggle to find the marketing support required for Automation and Sales Enablement success. We detail the capability and capacity technical expertise needed to maximize their CRM and automation technology investments for great sales and customer experiences.

Transcript

What Support Does Your Marketing Team Need for Automation and Sales Enablement?

Building, reaching, and sustaining successful automation and sales enablement to create great sales and customer experiences can seem overwhelming because it requires integrating multiple moving parts in the right order at the right time, including optimizing rapidly evolving core technologies and adding the appropriate AI, leveraging experienced marketing and sales professionals for great strategies, content, and campaigns, marketing and sales ops expertise for consistent execution, data governance and data management across multiple systems, and a culture committed to marketing and sales alignment.

Where Do Most Teams Stand Today?

So where do most teams actually stand today, and what’s holding them back? We’ll discuss what most teams already have in place for success, why finding automation and sales enablement support is so tricky, and what proven and tactical automation and sales enablement support looks like, how providing the right support helps your team achieve more with less, and finally, why not providing support overwhelms your team to both diminish and impact their results.

What Most Teams Already Have in Place

Let’s start by looking at how most teams are currently situated to achieve mature marketing automation and sales enablement. Today, most marketing teams have the internal talent or the existing agency partners they need to manage brands, craft multiple strategies, buy and run media campaigns, create great content, execute events, run social, pay per click, and SEO, and write great copy. So organizations already have the creative and strategic talent they need to fuel both go to market campaigns and automated customer campaigns.

The Critical Skills Gap

But because of the rapid adoption and evolution of CRM and automation technologies, one of the top challenges for most organizations is finding proven marketing automation and sales ops talent that know how to fully maximize your tech stack investments. Seventy percent of B2B companies and executives currently struggle to find this critical skill set because the technology itself is so new. So the market hasn’t had enough time to develop the volume of talent and experience required.

Because transitioning from struggling with tech to effective automation support for your team requires blending multiple skills, including both CRM and automation technology expertise with best practice marketing and sales process knowledge and frontline hands on technology workflow experience.

How the Right Support Drives Exponential Results

And when you provide your existing team with this full support, they can produce exponential results, and you actually achieve more with less. They can focus on their core competencies of strategy, creative, and campaign performance as your automation support team reduces all the friction of daily and consistent execution across both sets of funnels. And this support knowledge base is even more critical if you are serious about building mature automation because automation expertise allows your team to maximize the more advanced tech stack features now available, including real time dashboards, reporting, and attributions for smarter decisions, predictive lead scoring, and sales enablement features for increased sales productivity, and all the data governance and unified data tools, which are now required for more effective AI deployments, personalization, and advanced automations to transform today’s capabilities into long term advantages.

Deploying AI Confidently Within Salesforce

So now this level of support is even more important for organizations that want to confidently and safely deploy AI solutions directly within Salesforce for mature automation and sales enablement. Because when it comes to AI, your CRM is only as powerful as what flows into it. This support will ensure a strong data foundation. They help your team with the daily management of clean, connected, and enriched data across your tech stack, so your AI outputs are accurate today and your automated workflows are trustworthy as you scale.

Reducing Costs and Building Custom Solutions

This support also reduces cost by consolidating SaaS subscriptions and replacing third party tools with new AI capabilities built natively inside and on top of Salesforce. This specialized support also helps you build custom solutions that were previously cost prohibitive in Salesforce, giving your managers and leadership team the ability to automate business and data processes without expensive outside platforms.

Positioning Your Team for the Future with Agentic AI

And with that data foundation and this level of support in place, you’re positioned to deploy Agentic AI for advanced automations, real time alerts, and hyper personalization, driving competitive sales advantages and genuinely exceptional customer experiences across your funnels.

This video  “How Does Achieving Successful Automation and Sales Enablement Impact Sales and Marketing Ops”, part 4 in our Full Funnel Mandate Series, explores how new technologies, full funnel automation, and sales enablement is fundamentally changing the requirements for marketing and sales operations teams and the critical need for experienced technical support.

(Watch Time – 7:30)

Summary

How Does Achieving Successful Automation and Sales Enablement Impact Sales and Marketing Ops?

This video explores how new technologies, full funnel automation, and sales enablement is fundamentally changing the requirements for marketing and sales operations teams. We explain how that marketing workloads have tripled due to buyers’ digital-first expectations and resistance to early sales meetings and the critical need for technology expertise to optimize marketing automation stacks, bridge marketing and sales operations gaps, and implement proper data governance for trustworthy analytics and AI implementation.

We then discuss how and why automation must extend beyond go-to-market funnels to encompass the entire customer lifecycle, as Fortune 500 companies work toward automating 80% of B2B sales processes by 2027, forcing organizations of all sizes to adapt to these new digital automation expectations.

Transcript

How Does Achieving Successful Automation and Sales Enablement Impact Sales and Marketing Ops Daily Marketing & Sales Operations

So how does Forrester’s call to action, these new technologies, and full funnel automation and sales enablement impact the daily and strategic requirements for successful marketing and sales operations

The Tripled Workload: Expanded Volume and Scope for Marketing Teams

First, because of your buyer’s digital first expectations and their resistance to meeting with sales reps until they have shortlisted solutions, your marketing team’s volume and scope of work have at least tripled to support your go to market process. Marketing is still accountable for their historical functions of brand management, awareness, and lead generation to generate interest, including strategy and the creation of dozens of assets shared across multiple channels to build recognition and trust.

And then your buyers need to engage with 3 to 5 assets before they convert as marketing qualified leads. Next, the most initial dramatic increase in workload and scope comes from the sustained digital engagement, development, and conversion responsibilities required for successful nurturing and accountability for sales ready leads.

Because this increases the volume and the daily requirements for the constant production, oversight, and execution of campaigns, copy, content, and creative.

To accomplish this, marketing teams need to be ready to digitally educate 6 or more buyers for 3 to 12 months until they are ready to buy with increasingly personalized content for different types of buyers. Success also requires marketing teams to develop lead nurturing workflows with increased campaign execution to share digital content that takes different buyers through every stage of the sales funnel. With the final initial workload increase for your marketing managers and creatives being driven by your buyer’s desire to engage with multiple types of educational content as they move deeper into the sales funnel.

Teams Need Technology Expertise to Support Automation Implementation and Optimization for Improved ROI

The second impact of this shift to automation is that your marketing team needs the support of technology experts with practical marketing and sales process expertise to fully capture all the benefits and ROI possible with automation.

This experienced support can quickly launch customized or fix broken implementations so your team stops wasting time struggling with tech and quickly starts to realize the ROI and the results you were promised when Salesforce and other vendors sold you their software solutions.

Next you gain momentum and maturity. It’s required to optimize technology stacks with proven tactics and best practice workflows so your marketers can focus on their top priorities, while your support team turns your team’s strategies, campaigns, content, and hard work into higher quality sales ready leads that accelerates your funnels.

Marketing Needs to Bridge the Gap to Sales by Aligning Marketing Ops and Sales Ops

Then organizations are required to bridge the gap from marketing ops to sales ops with a seamless handoff so sales can help buyers make a final decision.

Because the marketing team and automated campaigns are doing most of the initial work turning leads into sales ready opportunities at the top and the middle of the funnel, marketing now needs to help support sales productivity. At the bottom of the funnel, managing lists in the CRM of scored and prioritized leads, and they also need to help sales ops implement all the sales enablement tools needed to help their sales team competitively develop and close new business.

Because when marketing bridges the gap successfully, it leads to increased productivity because both sales and marketing are aligned to create connected customer experiences.

Then once all these processes are implemented, both marketing and sales operations need a trusted resource that is staying current with all these rapidly evolving technologies. They can educate leadership about what’s now possible and to train your frontline teams how to fully leverage, adopt, and implement all the CRM automation sales enablement dashboard and AI features that you’re already investing in.

Increased and Critical Database Management: Governance, Measurement, and AI Readiness

And these dashboards and AI integrations point directly to the 3rd major area of impact of automation, the increased need for marketing to take accountability for database management and database stewardship to create and maintain competitive advantages.

This starts with your automation support team implementing and managing data governance best practices across your media, automation, and CRM tech stacks to ensure you have the proper data workflows, field mapping, integrations, and plumbing you need to assemble trustworthy data that can be maintained and then unified for accurate measurement and decisions.

Marketing and sales ops then need to use and monetize this trustworthy and unified data to create and maintain real time dashboards and attribution reports to support both daily marketing and sales execution, to help managers manage more effectively, and to help sales and marketing executives make smarter strategic decisions. And now with increasing urgency, sales and marketing ops also need to continuously maintain strong data governance and enhanced data sets to be able to effectively implement multiple AI tools beyond the most basic automations, especially machine learning, agentic, and generative solutions.

Marketing Needs to Extend to Full Customer Lifecycle: Expanding Automation Beyond the Go-to-Market Funnel

Up to this point, all the impacts discussed have been limited to the go to market funnel, but the final major and perhaps largest long term impact will be the requirement to deploy automation across your entire customer life cycle for a fully connected customer experience.

Because close to 50% of the go to market automation first movers and innovators have already started or actively planning to deploy marketing automation and AI across all their customer funnels.

Which is why, to paraphrase, Forrester believes that to survive and thrive, marketing organizations now need to also bridge the gap from the go to market funnel to supporting every revenue funnel, requiring marketing to become the primary architects of automated customer experiences accountable for deploying the same technologies, tactics, and digital automation strategies to customer adoption, loyalty, retention, cross sell, upsell, and advocacy campaigns.

The Competitive Imperative: Keeping Pace with B2B Automation Expectations

Ultimately, most B2B companies of all shapes and sizes are now being forced to keep up with the new digital first automation expectations now being set for B2B customers as the Fortune 500 is driving towards their goal of automating 80% of the entire B2B sales process, which Gartner now predicts could happen by the end of 2027 as companies strive to lower costs and chase substantially increased results at every stage of the funnel.

In part 3 of our video series “Marketing Ops New Full Funnel Support Mandate” discuss what B2B Buyers need and expect from marketing and sales ops to support and automate their buyers journey and their customer journey. We also discuss the need for a seamless hand offs to sales, customer service and account managers when Buyers are ready.

(Watch Time – 4:45)

Summary

What do B2B Buyers need and expect from Marketing and Sales Ops? Today’s B2B buyers want marketing teams to lead their buying process. When they are ready to buy they expect a seamless hand off to sales and post-sale they also expect digital education and even more personalized content during their adoption and customer journey. Organizations that embrace full-funnel automation are seeing stronger engagement, loyalty, retention and increased revenue as a result.

Transcript

What Do B2B Buyers Now Need and Expect?

So what do buyers now need and expect from your marketing and sales operations for an automated buyer’s journey and connected customer experience?

Top of Funnel: Building Awareness and Trust

The digital first buyer’s needs and expectations start at the very top of the funnel. To build awareness and trust, B2B buyers now expect multiple types and formats of content delivered in up to 5 channels. Most buyers now require between 10 to 21 or more touches before they’ll convert as an inbound lead.

The Long Buyer’s Journey

Now most inbound leads are not ready to immediately meet with sales. Most buyers now start their journey at least 3 to 12 months before they’re ready to buy. 54% won’t transact for over a year. 80% want to avoid your sales team until they’ve completed their research and are ready to shortlist. And 40% would prefer to avoid sales completely if possible

Middle of Funnel: Nurturing and Education

All these desires dramatically impact the middle of the funnel. Because according to Merkel, buyers now expect marketers and not sales reps to manage the first 65% of the buyer’s journey with digital education and lead nurturing campaigns. And according to Gartner, buyers now expect educational content and campaigns to support their purchase decision at every stage of the funnel, including awareness, consideration, and preference. And moving forward, buyers are also increasingly requiring that these campaigns and content are personalized for both campaign engagement and serious consideration of your solution, which dramatically increases your marketing team’s workload. Because today, the average B2B purchase decision includes 6 to 10 decision makers and influencers.

Bottom of Funnel: The Marketing-to-Sales Handoff

Next, at the bottom of the sales funnel, buyers now expect a seamless handoff from marketing to sales when they’re ready to buy, expecting sales to be enabled with prior engagement history and additional third party data. They don’t want it to feel overly invasive, but according to a survey of buyers, 74% of leads that have opted into GDPR and cookies expect sales reps to immediately add value enabled with a basic understanding of their company’s fundamentals in prior content, events, and email engagement. And marketing teams that provide their sales team these tools increase their win rates by 28%.

Post-Sale: Automation and the Customer Experience

And after these increased wins, buyers that become customers now expect automation and continued personalized digital engagement because B2B customers now state that a disconnected customer experience after the sale is now their number one frustration.

The same leading marketers that built mature sales automation are now extending automation to build digital customer funnels across multiple processes to meet these new expectations with profitable results. The 25% of companies that automate onboarding and training experience a 92% increase in adoption and an 88% increase in loyalty. Marketing teams that use it for continued education and event marketing with personalization see a 65% increase in advocacy. And the 20% of mature companies that are doing both are experiencing a 4x increase in retention. And finally, mature teams that are also deploying their tech systems for personalized cross sell and upsell see an increase in campaign engagement and a 60% increase in purchases per customer.

Summary: Marketing’s Expanding Role

So to summarize, marketing’s function and role is now permanently extended and much more complex because of this combination of B2B buyers and now customers’ digital first habits and desires for frictionless automated experiences with a seamless handoff to sales and customer service. Combined with the multiple financial rewards experienced when marketing supports full funnel automation is why Forrester’s senior analysts believe that for sales and marketing organizations to survive and thrive, B2B marketing leaders are now required to continue to quickly transform their organizations from lead generation and brand awareness with increased capability and capacity to support sales with continuous digital engagement across the entire sales funnel and customer life cycle, executing multiple processes, and increased use and optimization of automation technologies.