VENDOR INTERVIEW: How ZoomInfo Aligns Sales and Marketing

Customer: Chip Terry
Title: VP and General Manager of Sales Intelligence
Company: ZoomInfo
Web: www.ZoomInfo.com

Q: How can companies better align Sales and Marketing?
A: The most successful companies in the B2B space align Sales and Marketing in three ways. First, they make certain that Sales and Marketing are using the same database, so that both groups understand who the customers are, who the customers should be, and which ones they should be going after. Second, Sales and Marketing need to be aligned around the process of selling, from the first time a customer is contacted to the time that the opportunity closes. Finally, Sales and Marketing need to be aligned in a person-to-person sense. To get people to work together you need people who respect each other.

Q: How can management reduce the conflicts over lead generation?
A: Conflicts around lead generation are common. Sales complains that Marketing isn’t giving them good leads, while Marketing complains that Sales isn’t following up on the leads that Marketing provides. The first way to eliminate this conflict is to agree on what constitutes a valid lead. Even something as simple as agreeing on a job title inside an industry can help. For example, if the head of Sales and the head of Marketing can agree that they should be targeting the VP of engineering in a technology company, there will be far fewer misunderstandings.

Q: How can technology like CRM help?
A: Having Sales and Marketing working with the same database also reduces conflict. Prior to joining ZoomInfo, I was the VP of Marketing at another company. I would do these great campaigns, with awesome creative materials, gathering information online and offline, and I built these fantastic lists of leads. Then I’d go to the VP of Sales and hand him the list and he’d say: "Great work, Chip. Unfortunately, we’re already calling on most of these companies." If we had had the database aligned, I wouldn’t have ended up building a list with names that weren’t useful.

Q: How many leads should come from Marketing as opposed to Sales?
A: It depends upon the industry and the strategy of your company in that industry. In some B2B firms, the percentage of leads coming from Marketing can be as high as 75 percent. In other firms, it might be as little as 25 percent. What’s important is that there’s agreement on how the leads will be generated and how they’ll be pursued. Just as importantly, you want to know what happened to the leads that came from both sources. Marketing can’t improve the quality of the leads if they don’t know which leads were easy to develop and close. So you have to make sure that everyone is on the same database and has the same understanding of the sales process and how the pipeline looks.

Q: What about the people issues?
A: Sometimes the most difficult challenge is getting individuals from Sales and Marketing to cooperate as people. Incentives play a role. If you have Marketing compensated on the number of sales that take place, they’re more likely to cooperate with Sales than if Marketing is compensated on the number of leads they generate, for instance. You also must be certain that whenever there’s an executive meeting, you have the head of Sales and the head of Marketing in the room at the same time. Finally, it’s vitally important that Marketing be exposed directly to customers. Few things are more valuable to Marketing than having the opportunity to listen to what real life customers have to say.