There’s no sport more energy sapping than boxing, apparently.

According to extensive research (i.e. one page of Google Search) an hour’s sparring burns up to 800 calories.

So the good news is that if you spend eight hours a day fighting with colleagues in sales then you should be in peak physical condition. The bad news? You’re probably missing out on some huge commercial opportunities for your business.

At least, that’s the opinion of Tino Triste, our Digital Strategy Director, whose advice for construction and manufacturing marketers forms the basis of this week’s ‘Ask the Experts’.

Tino’s plea is for marketing and sales objectives to be more closely aligned in order to ensure that data captured is as meaningful as possible so that opportunities can be exploited.

He’s in good company. One of the great Seth Godin’s more well-known quotes on measurement goes; ‘Measurement is fabulous. Unless you’re too busy measuring what’s easy to measure as opposed to what’s important.’

If you could convince your clients to try one new thing, what would it be and why?

If I could convince my clients to try one new thing it would be to unify their sales and marketing data and objectives.

There can often be a disconnect between sales and marketing within organisations. Sales teams complain that they don’t get enough quality leads while marketing teams are often unhappy with the lack of visibility lower down the funnel, causing some uncertainty on how their hard work is impacting the bottom line.

It doesn’t need to be that way. We live in the age of data, and businesses that leverage the power of data to inform their decisions are the ones that succeed.

With the right tools, it’s possible to track every interaction a prospect has with a brand, from that first visit all the way through to when they become a paying customer and beyond.

Each data point across marketing and sales is a potentially valuable asset that can be leveraged to drive performance.

We don’t want to become snow-blind with reams of meaningless data, but through collaboration we should be able to commence with activity in the full knowledge of we need to collect in order to demonstrate our successes, and bolster our future learnings.

By establishing feedback loops from sales, companies can improve the impact of their marketing activities on revenue growth.

If you’re interested, there’s a great Marketing Week piece that suggests if you don’t invest at least 5% of your budget into research then you don’t know what you’re doing… https://mba.marketingweek.com/if-you-dont-invest-5-of-your-budget-in-research-you-dont-know-what-youre-doing/

So, there you have it. A creative asking for more research, who’d have thought it?