Marketing and Sales Alignment

Can Marketing Help Sales Sell?

On recent call with a prospective enterprise customer, the marketing manager told me that at her company, the relationship between marketing and sales was so bad that the sales team did not even allow her to access their Salesforce CRM system.

In this economy, fighting between marketing and sales teams must stop. The need to maximize revenue using every tool at your disposal is simply too important. Research shows that companies where marketing and sales can collaborate through the revenue cycle generate more leads and convert more leads into revenue.

True Social Selling

Years ago a successful sales representative knew how to optimize their time by ‘reading’ their prospects.  A quick phone call would be made to colder opportunities, while a day would be spent golfing with a good bet.  The key to the salesperson’s success was interpreting the signals of their prospect, allowing them to focus their time when it was needed most, at pivotal moments during the buying process with those most likely to buy.

But then things changed.

5 Important Ways Sales can help Marketing

Often the relationship between sales and marketing seems one way, since typically it's marketing's job to pass leads to sales.  But the relationship is truly two ways, since marketing relies on sales for critical information in order to make decisions about pricing, messaging, and product roadmaps.  Receiving this information from sales means that marketing does not have to find it by contacting prospects or doing additional primary and secondary research, saving the company valuable time and additional cost.  Below are five ways that sales can significantly help marketing.

SiriusDecisions Summit 2009 – What we learned at the 2008 Summit, and why we are excited for 2009

Here at Marketo, everyone is very excited about the upcoming SiriusDecisions 2009 Summit being held May 13-15 in Scottsdale, Arizona.  This year’s topics focus around Lessons Learned, and over 400 attendees will have the opportunity to share their experiences through panel discussions, networking sessions, and workshops.   We are looking forward to all the well-respected speakers, and many of the sessions, including those discussing pipeline dynamics, social media, benchmark modeling and the technology roadmap. 

IDC Workbook: Optimizing Marketing and Sales Lead Management with Marketing Automation

The marketing automation space is exploding. And whereas the rapid emergence of flexible, easy-to-use, e-marketing tools is good news for marketers, choosing the right solution for your business can be a daunting process.

If you’re grappling with how to make the right choice, or just looking to make a business case for marketing automation at your company, here’s a new resource from the smart analysts at IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice: a new workbook titled “Optimizing Marketing and Sales Lead Management with Marketing Automation.”

IDC Analyst Connection: Coordinating Marketing and Sales across the Entire Revenue Cycle

Michael Gerard, Research Vice President for IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice and Executive Advisory Group, recently published an Analyst Connection sponsored by Marketo titled Coordinating Marketing and Sales Across the Entire Revenue Cycle. In this, Michael answers several questions about sales and marketing alignment. Here are some excerpts (or download the full PDF)

Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus - Podcast Vol III - The Sales Perspective

One of the interesting things about lead management software is that although the soft benefits (e.g. running campaigns with less manual effort, more time to focus on the strategic and creative activities that improve marketing ROI) apply to the marketing department, the hard ROI benefits (e.g. more and better quality leads, faster deal cycles, and higher win rates) are primarily seen by the sales department (and of course the company as a whole).

The Revenue Cycle: A New Model for Explosive Revenue Growth

Traditionally companies have talked about and analyzed the 'Sales Cycle'. The problem is that the sales cycle looks at only a portion of the complete revenue process. This presents two main problems.

Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus – Podcast

The relationship between Sales and Marketing at B2B companies is too often precarious and subject to change day by day.

The problem is that Marketing and Sales play by different sets of rules. Sales are quota and bottom-line driven, where success can be easily measured through the number of closed deals. In Marketing, nebulous terms like ‘impressions’ and ‘website traffic’ are too often used to benchmark results. All too often, Marketing thinks it is exceeding its lead generation goals while at the same Sales is wondering why they aren’t getting enough good leads.

Gaining Power and Influence for Marketing

Roy Young, president of MarketingProfs and author of the excellent book Marketing Champions, recently discussed how to gain power and influence in the marketing role (this was part of his appearance on the Marketing Voices podcast). Here's what Roy had to say, with my additional commentary.

Improving Lead Quality Can Improve Sales Productivity

I attended the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, and one of keynotes was given by Stu Schmidt, Vice President of Solution Sales at Cisco Webex.  Among many interesting things he imparted in his presentation on sales process and measurement, was this:

A 10% improvement in lead quality can result in a 40% improvement in sales productivity.

While Stu was talking about improving the sales process to qualify leads earlier, I found this to be an interesting statistic for marketers, as well.  As a marketer, I spent the past couple of years (at another company), attempting to nurture leads until they were sales-ready. That is, I tried to build a process that allowed me to communicate with prospects, build relationships with them, and track their interest in my product line.

Drive Revenue With Lead Scoring

Another popular session at Dreamforce 2007 was titled 21st Century Lead Cultivation. My favorite part was the presentation from Jason Hekl, Sr. Director of Marketing at InQuira, which focused on best practices in lead scoring.

Before Jason spoke, Steve Gershik from Eloqua presented results from a study that demonstrated the ROI of implementing lead scoring. The study looked at 10 companies for the six months before and six months after implementing lead scoring, and reported on the average improvement in key marketing metrics.

Bridging The Sales and Marketing Divide - Dreamforce 2007

Marketo is one of the sponsors of salesforce.com's global User and Developer Conference, Dreamforce 2007. One of the first sessions was titled "Bridging the Sales and Marketing Divide", and not surprisingly, the focus was how to break down the barriers between Sales and Marketing by automating the lead development / lead nurturing process.

Marketo Ignite Revenue Sales Insight Launch Party

On Thursday, June 4th over 200 customers, prospects, analysts and friends of Marketo attended an evening at Hotel Vitale in San Francisco for the launch of Marketo Sales Insight.  The party was high energy and with filled some great spirits, snacks, and demos of the new product.  Phil Fernandez, President and CEO of Marketo, shared some thoughts during this fun night, talking about how Sales Insight came to fruition, explaining why so many customers were implementing these new features, and how this latest solution is helping marketing and sales collaborate together to ignite revenue.

But don’t trust us, this is what some of our favorite twitterers had to say about our launch party.

How Marketers can be as good as Google

The other day when speaking to a well respected SEO he commented on how Google lacked sophistication, noting that their algorithms could be enhanced and results for searchers improved. He specifically commented on how results differ for the plural of words from the singular, which I agree can be very frustrating (as both a searcher and search marketer). Even though this can be annoying, I commented that this was not very important to Google. That instead the goal for Google is not to be perfect, just better than other search engines. So as long as their competitors are less than perfect, they can be too.

Marketing can be like this as well. It’s not that you have to deliver the perfect message to the ideal prospect every time. Instead, you often just have to get pretty close, and the intellect of the consumer can do the rest.

Announcing Marketo Lead Management 3.0

A quick post to share the news that Marketo Lead Management 3.0 is now available! This is our largest release since we first launched the product last year. It delivers a comprehensive upgrade to our user interface as well as a great new design, plus a ton of significant new functionality in every part of the application.

Marketo's Secret Sauce for Demand Generation

You may ask, why should anyone care what I have to say about demand generation? Well, at Marketo, we’ve built a world-class demand generation machine that has helped us in just 10 months to sign up over 130 customers in more than eight countries, including companies such as Thomson Reuters, Reed Business, and CollabNet.

Now, I'm not writing this to promote Marketo, but I think our results are proof that we’re doing something right with our own demand generation and lead management processes. I frequently get asked to share how we achieve these marketing results, so I recently presented a fact-filled webinar titled Secret Sauce for Demand Generation: How Marketo Nurtures, Scores and Accelerates Leads through the Revenue Cycle

Lead Generation Best Practices: Thought Leadership with The Funnelholic

The next interview in the B2B Marketing thought leader interview series is with Craig Rosenberg, author of The Funnelholic (one of my favorite B2B marketing blogs). Craig is Vice President, Products and Services at Tippit, Inc., the world's fastest growing B2B online media and lead generation company. You can also follow him on Twitter (funnelholic).

Introducing Modern B2B Marketing Podcasts

As the marketing departments of B2B companies gain recognition and responsibility as a full partner to sales in creating revenue through demand generation, marketers should continue to hone their skills and knowledge. With that in mind, Marketo is introducing a series of podcasts with thought leaders in B2B marketing.

Lead Management Will Never Be The Same Again

$300 billion dollars a year. That’s what the 3,000 largest B2B companies in the world spend annually on lead generation, resulting in billions of leads. Yet despite this massive expense, I have yet to find a sales executive who is happy with the number and quality of marketing generated leads.

Why the disconnect? The old model where marketing generates a lead and sends it over to sales doesn't work anymore. Mass marketing, big tradeshows, and buying lists don’t work in a world where buyers use the web, search, and social media to take control of their buying process. Companies today meet prospective customers earlier in the buying cycle, and those customers want to engage with sales later than ever. This dynamic complexity also makes it harder than ever for marketing to identify which programs really impact revenue and pipeline.

Online Marketing Tools Come of Age – Article

An article in B-to-B Magazine yesterday validated the reality of most marketers: that we don't have big capital budgets. You know, the kind used for most enterprise software purchases.   We have monthly and quarterly budgets, and we're frequently looking for software that will help us do our jobs better (and track ROI) without requiring huge upfront costs and implementations.

In the article 'Online marketing tools come of age,' Marketo president and CEO Phil Fernandez says that "it's easier for a marketing department to pay $5,000 per month on a piece of software they really think they need and say, 'We'll cut it off if it's not profitable.''

Invest in marketing automation

In my last post, I argued that Marketing needs to stop being seen a cost center and start earning a seat at the revenue table. Fundamentally, this requires B2B marketers to:

1. Drive revenue by filling the revenue pipeline with enough sales-ready opportunities, and
2. Improve accountability and predictability by connecting their efforts to hard metrics like revenue and profits.