If you’re building a piece of furniture, you rarely do it with just the power tools, or just the finishing tools. You may want both, or the work will either lack definition and polish, or take prohibitively long to finish.
You can see a similar dynamic at play in segmentation and targeting, especially in the enterprise. When it comes to finding the exact right contacts to talk to at an organization, it gets harder and harder the further up you move into enterprise. There’s just too many people in these companies to target reliably without a strong sales and marketing partnership.
Marketing has at their disposal the power tools for making the rough cuts and sizes for segmentation. Third party and first party data. Data hygiene and automation tools. All stuff that works well at volume, but loses precision on a person-by-person basis. That’s where sales comes in, with the sandpaper and carving tools to whittling things down further until only the most important data remains. It’s completely manual, but it’s far more precise.
Yet most companies operate as if only one part of the equation is needed. They use all the martech under the sun to identify and target their ideal customer, and wonder why they are still missing opportunities or targeting less-than-ideal prospects.
Others rely to heavily on their sales teams to manually pull the data together, and wonder why those teams are struggling to make quota.
You’ve got to use both to do it right.