Are Sales and Marketing Chatting Enough? [CHART]

Collaboration has been a big topic for us at Eloqua lately. With this week’s announcement of Chatter Inside Eloqua, we thought it would be a good idea to explain why we believe this will make a huge difference to marketers.

On the left hand side of this chart, you can easily see the pain experienced by the 92% of companies who responded to Forrester’s survey as being less than tightly aligned.  Compare that with the joy experienced by those respondents to Aberdeen’s survey who report being tightly aligned and experiencing a 32% annual revenue growth as compared to 7% for the poorly aligned.

Social tools within the enterprise are about more than just keeping up with your colleagues. They’re about producing things more effectively with the team that you know, and connecting in unexpected ways with experts that you never knew you needed.  Collaboration between Sales and Marketing has never been accomplished simply by agreeing on lead criteria and definitions.  It requires interacting with each other on a regular basis as though you were standing at a water cooler – even if you are not in the same office, or country for that matter.

We believe that this way of doing business is not just the latest trend – it will become the way most businesses operate.  Are you using social tools at your company?  Tell us your stories!

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