Overcoming the Top Barriers and Challenges for Sales and Marketing

What barriers exist to overcoming your top challenges in sales and marketing? What are your top challenges?

A recent chart from MarketingSherpa (see below) shows analysis from marketers and their top barriers to overcoming B2B marketing challenges. Let’s discuss the information and how to overcome the challenges.

Barriers vary from external forces, but many are internal

Some of the key takeaways from the chart and survey from MarketingSherpa:

• 62% of all marketers surveyed identify lack of resources in staffing, budgeting or time as the greatest barrier to their marketing success. What are these hard working marketers to do?
• Media and publishing sector didn’t view content marketing as a barrier as they already have much content to use! What have they missed? 
• Large organizations while usually sitting comfy on the resources side, said they lack strategic vision and flexibility in their marketing efforts, a spot where smaller more flexible organizations excelled, mostly due to their entrepreneurial nature and culture.
• Marketers who have been around a long time and learned strategic perspective over their trial and error marketing style cohorts, value best practices in content development and gathering insights on their target audience.

In the conversations we have with many different organizations, whether size or resources, the ones that ‘get it’ are the ones that take the time to put in the necessary resources and budgets necessary to hit their goals.

What goals? Sales and marketing aligned goals. Without sales and marketing becoming unified and aligned what is the purpose anyways?

Overcoming the sales and marketing barriers

There are a few things that sales and marketing teams whether in a one person shop, 25 person shop, or 500 person org, can do now to help get going on the right track:

1. Talk to each other – No not just another meeting, set revenue goals together and reach them
2. Work together on the target audience profiling – Sales might have one ideal target audience while marketing may have another. Stop that! Get together and put the same target audience together and go with it.
3. Embrace inbound marketing – Inbound marketing is a sales and marketing person’s dream come true. While it does not solve all of the selling and marketing issues, it does give you a fresh new approach to selling and marketing. Learn more by clicking around on some of the top articles on this blog.

A little bonus here, check out the graphic below which MarketingSherpa made earlier this year. It covers the top 5 most effective demand generation tactics which are:

1. Website design, management and optimization (31%)
2. SEO (29%)
3. Email marketing (26%)
4. Content marketing (23%) (watch this one go up this next year)
5. Tradeshows (20%) (last on purpose?)

Jump the Barriers

The good thing (thinking optimistically) about barriers are that they can be overcome.