As a B2B SaaS marketer, with a few decades of experience, I’m constantly keeping my finger on the pulse of new themes or challenges for the industry.
A few months ago, the Pitchly team hit the convention floor at the International Legal Technology Association Annual Conference (ILTACon). It raised the important question of how marketing and IT can work more collaboratively to generate real growth for their organizations.
It was clear from our conversations with innovative IT leaders that there are many opportunities out there for these typically separate teams to share their like-minded goals and to work more closely.
The connection between marketing tech and IT can be weak at times, but opportunities for efficiencies and ROI are significant. Not to mention the functional overlap between teams; the average marketing team dedicates 23% of its budget to its tech stack. And 21% of their tools are oven times cross-charged with IT.
This makes it all the more important to create a strong connection and communicate about shared goals between these teams. When there’s a disconnect, the organization’s overall go-to-market strategy, client experience and ability to scale are at stake.
While marketing and IT may seem relatively distinct on the surface, once we dig into the top priorities of each department, we begin to uncover a clear overlap. Let’s take a look at what these top priorities are.
The common thread between marketing and IT
The benefits of cross-department collaboration
Why marketing and IT need to work together
Bringing data into the conversation
How marketing and IT can work together
For a full overview of the top priorities of marketing and business development teams
in professional services, check out our industry report
While there is a range of focus areas for both marketing and IT, the idea of pushing the organization toward growth intersects with almost every one of them. And these two departments are both crucial to help set the organization up for success.
Without marketing putting the right strategies in place and IT reinforcing an environment that supports innovation, scalable growth for the organization is not possible. And when these teams work in alignment, the growth possibilities increase tenfold.
Before we discuss the benefits of marketing and IT working together, it’s important to acknowledge the advantages that are realized when cross-department collaboration occurs.
On average, a third of marketing teams’ budgets are spent on their marketing technology stack. And over a quarter of that martech budget is allocated to operations. That means that not only is technology a crucial consideration for marketing, but the technology selected by marketing also impacts the overall organization.
Technology helps the marketing team best understand the organization’s customers. Without a deep and nuanced understanding of current, prospective and future customers, marketing’s ability to influence is minimal. In a recent industry report, we found that digital transformation was simultaneously a major struggle and a top priority for professional services growth teams.
So when you bring in the IT team to help with not only selecting technology but also with weaving it into marketing processes, the benefits will be felt. And from the IT perspective, collaborating with marketing on their tech stack can help keep efficiency goals in check, ensure proper implementation, as well as potentially discover overlaps in the tech requirements of other departments.
When you take a look at the main priorities of both marketing and IT, almost all of those can be addressed by working collaboratively to streamline processes and align technology with strategies for growth. In essence, many of the IT priorities also support marketing priorities.
Data is the main constant when it comes to the two different departments. On the marketing side, team members need real-time, reliable access to data. They activate this data to inform a variety of their strategies, from content creation to paid ads targeting to customer profile research and more.
IT makes this data access possible for marketing and other departments. One of IT’s most pressing tasks is to ensure that data is collected, centralized and organized efficiently so that it can be accessed and contextualized easily by all relevant parties.
When IT and marketing work together, the line between the data technology and the ability to effectively activate the data becomes very clear. And the monetary impact of having these two concepts in alignment is undeniable. This is one of the most ROI-driven reasons for IT and marketing to work collaboratively.
There is a lot at stake regarding a collaborative relationship between marketing and IT. But if your organization has some deeply embedded siloes between these departments, it can be tricky to know where to start and how to change the culture. Here are some ideas that can help you create that interdepartmental synergy, facilitate change management and help your organization grow.
Put a meeting on your calendar every quarter to check in on each department’s main priorities for the coming months. Share important initiatives to raise awareness and perhaps identify ways in which each team may be able to support the other or brainstorm creative ways to meet those goals.
A little awareness goes a long way, and simply being in the know about what the other team is planning can help to develop new ideas, prevent duplicated efforts and hold you accountable to deliver on action plans.
It’s important to keep track of a growing tech stack, especially between departments. If this conversation gets neglected, you may end up with overlapping software causing unnecessary budget sinkholes. These check-ins can also allow both teams to look critically at all of the technology in place to see if there is anything that isn’t being used and can be cut. Or where a goal exists and new software needs to be researched.
Check-ins can also be a great opportunity to get training scheduled. Sometimes, the software is not being used because it’s not fully mastered and maximized. Use these meetings to decide what ongoing training needs to be scheduled, and perhaps even film tutorials to be accessed on an on-demand basis.
If you do this collaborative assessment once or twice a year, you will very quickly notice a shift in the effectiveness of your stack.
As I mentioned, data is one of the most crucial links between IT and marketing. Creating a solid strategy that gets data from collection to sorting to activating makes the difference between a synergistic relationship between marketing and IT and a dissonant relationship.
When the data processes are reviewed and brainstormed between multiple departments, it will help to inform and elevate the go-to-market strategy. While it may be easy to think that GTM considerations fall mostly into the lap of marketing, sales and product, it is highly cross-functional and therefore concerns every single team.
When you give IT a seat at the table by weaving data into GTM conversations, not only will you have a more well-rounded action plan, but you’re also allowing IT to more directly impact your organization’s bottom line.
Data enablement is a concept that is making it much easier and more intuitive for marketing and IT to get on the same page.
The core tenet of data enablement is to ensure that every person who needs access to data has it in the most streamlined manner possible. This starts with data collection, but the true power comes in when aspects of sorting/filtering, access and activation are considered.
When these strategies are in place, it makes it easy for IT to have an active hand in boosting the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing processes.
Data enablement platforms like Pitchly not only make it easier for marketing and IT to work together, but it also makes their jobs infinitely easier.
While several disparate data systems are often a major pain point for both marketing and IT teams, Pitchly can relieve that burden. No matter how many separate, disconnected databases you currently have, Pitchly can bring them all together in the same place, giving you a centralized data system that gives you the confidence you’re always pulling the most accurate, up-to-date data.
IT can be sure that data efficiency and accuracy are at an all-time high, and marketing can save hours each week with easy filters and search features.
So if you’re ready to take a big step towards an effective and streamlined synergistic relationship between marketing and IT, reach out to us for a demo of Pitchly’s data enablement platform.