Enablement
Bridging the Gap Between Digital Manufacturing and Digital Transformation
By Jeannine Castater — On December 11, 2019
The future of the manufacturing industry is bright. Industry 4.0 marks an era in which the majority of industrial manufacturers are building upon their existing infrastructure to become "digitally advanced" by 2020, spending over $900 billion on greater connectivity and smarter factories.
However, despite these advances, there are still a number of challenges manufacturers need to overcome before they can adopt this status. Shifting workforce demographics have prompted executive teams to rethink how to train and onboard new associates; a proliferation of new product releases has generated a mountain of additional work for various operations teams; the Amazon effect has driven customer expectations through the roof; and tightening industry regulations have put traditional production processes into question.
And of course, amid — and perhaps because of — these developments, there are also mounting frustrations between two departments who feel the knock-on pressures further downstream: Sales and Marketing. In order to keep apace with accelerating product development cycles, sales and marketing teams need to work collaboratively in terms of collating and accessing content. So why, in this era of industrial digitalization, are these teams finding their efforts misaligned?
The Misalignment of Sales and Marketing
Firstly, increasing product updates mean that even the most efficient sales operatives find they are wasting significant chunks of their day trying to access the right files in order to present their customers with the latest, most relevant messaging. They also need to engage in quick and efficient back-and-forth discussions with their marketing counterparts on projects such as updating product specifications, or developing sales presentations, but this can prove impossible without the right systems in place.
Meanwhile, marketing execs are often disheartened by the lack of feedback from the sales team on which content is engaging (or discouraging) customers, and what changes need to be made to improve the overall brand messaging. This channel of communication between teams needs to be established from the outset of the sales journey, so that any messaging can be consistently personalized throughout.
