Together for the Better

There’s a difference between butting heads and putting heads together. The first way creates pain. The second creates solutions. The goal of better alignment between sales and marketing should always be solution oriented. But where should management start creating that synergy?

“Some companies simply hold more meetings between sales and marketing departments,” observes Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing. “That does not solve the alignment challenge. It just adds cooks to the kitchen.”

Rather, reps and marketers must have common objectives and work toward the same goals. Marketers must be tied to something close to revenue – opportunities, for example. And opportunities must be defined as salespeople define them. “This is the foundation of alignment,” Heinz stresses.

In addition to common objectives and definitions, compensation should also be aligned, top executives must back alignment, marketing plans should be reviewed by sales leaders, and regular and metrics-based progress reviews must be conducted. Heinz also recommends building relationships between reps and marketers through informal sports and leisure activities and measuring team satisfaction before and after the big changes are made.

Tech Assist

Technology can also assist. For example, Marketo and Eloqua offer solutions that can manage and monitor leads. “Tools facilitate a strategy, but they are not a strategy,” Heinz says.

Eloqua provides a platform for sales and marketing, explains Jill Rowley, Eloqua’s head of enterprise sales. “It enables better targeting and segmentation and automates manual processes.” Eloqua’s software scores leads, sending hot leads to salespeople via their customer relationship management (CRM) system and nurturing the others.

Thorough integration of Eloqua and CRM is essential, as Eloqua also gathers information from CRM, which helps to nurture leads and speed up the sales cycle. “It gets data from CRM on who the prospect is, who your competitors are, and what the prospect’s needs are,” Rowley notes.

In addition, Eloqua tracks who reads the materials sales reps send. Rowley explains, “It reads [prospects’] digital body language so reps know who to call and when to call.” And Eloqua lives where reps live – in CRM, email, and iPads.

All these advantages have made Eloqua users out of such firms as Dell, Cisco, and Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters reports that aligning sales and marketing with Eloqua has resulted in a 20 percent increase in leads sent to sales, a 72 percent reduction in the time taken to convert leads to opportunities, and a 175 percent increase in revenue (see “Big Gains through Alignment”).

Silverpop’s core technology sits at the intersection of sales and marketing, explains its senior vice president of sales Todd McCormick. “It enables marketers to be more effective in driving the right leads to the right salespeople at the right time. We are the glue between the two departments.”

Silverpop uniquely integrates marketing automation with email, mobile, and social tools in one ecosystem. This enables seamless marketing one-to-one, rather than one-to-many. Like other marketing automation solutions, Silverpop allows scoring and distribution of leads but performs other functions, as well. McCormick says this makes Silverpop very robust.

Silverpop captures data from social media so that it can be considered when marketing decisions are made. It allows sign-ins in order to capture data from LinkedIn and Twitter. It can push dynamic marketing content out to prospects on all sorts of mobile devices, including BlackBerrys, iPads, and iPhones. And Silverpop integrates tightly with all major CRM systems.

Silverpop will continue to build on this integrated platform, capturing and interpreting the big data from social media and adding to its mobile capabilities. “We have the right technology and can now layer in more advanced programs and features,” McCormick argues.

Leads for Life

“Marketing used to throw leads over fences,” says Dave Fitzgerald, executive vice president of Brainshark. “Now buyers get 70 percent of their information from Google, white papers, and Webinars before they talk to a rep. Cold calling is dead.”

In the new world, marketers must create – and reps must use – more content that is customized for each segment and delivered digitally to mobile devices. “Buyers do not want to talk to reps or read white papers,” Fitzgerald says. “The preferred medium is video-on-demand on mobile devices. They don’t want an appointment. They want to look at content whenever they want on iPads, smartphones, and tablets.”

Brainshark is a platform for easily and inexpensively creating video-on-demand for mobile devices. “Most video technologies require specialists,” Fitzgerald says. “[Brainshark’s] can be used by the average businessperson in sales or marketing.”

Brainshark videos can be posted on Websites or social media or emailed by marketing, sometimes in response to inbound emails. Brainshark then tracks who views the videos, when they view, how long they watch, and to whom, in turn, the recipients pass the videos along. If the video contains a survey, results are returned.

Marketers create Brainshark videos to interest, nurture, and qualify buyers. Reps make videos to push buyers toward closing. For example, a video summary of a proposal can be sent with the full proposal text attached.

Thus, Brainshark can effectively help sales reps overcome two common and related challenges: securing face-to-face meetings, which is increasingly difficult, and the decreasing impact of emails. “Reps are very good [when making] live contact,” Fitzgerald notes, “but these [meetings] are hard to get and expensive.”
Brainshark is now used by 2,000 companies, including 40 percent of the Fortune 500.

Big Gains through Alignment

In 2011, Thomson Reuters salespeople often distrusted leads from the marketing department. Reps left about one-third of these leads unopened. The great majority of the leads that were opened did not generate an immediate sales opportunity and were abandoned by reps. And these unsuccessful leads got no further nurturing by marketing.

Thomson Reuters has now aligned sales and marketing and reengineered its entire lead-management process. With the help of Eloqua, the firm is driving toward revenue performance management. Results have been dramatic: