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CRM Magazine | May 2012

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Integrate Marketing and Sales for Revenue Results

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With the common overarching objective of growing the business, one would think that the workflow process between sales and marketing would function like a well-oiled machine. However, if that really were the case, then why is it that, according to research from SiriusDecisions, salespeople only work on 11 percent of the leads marketers send their way? The fundamental problem with marketings ability to contribute more directly to the sales departments success is that each department has its own pipeline. At many companies, the two pipelines are managed separately and contain different data. And even when there is overlap, new intelligence about a lead in one pipeline doesnt necessarily reach the other pipeline. The information exchange is haphazard or non-existent, ending in leakagethe slipping-away of leads that could have become customers. Sales is now coming to marketing and saying, Guys, we need your help, says Debbie Qaqish, a principal and chief revenue marketing officer at The Pedowitz Group, which helps companies fine-tune and execute demand generation strategies. At the same time, the marketing department is under pressure to demonstrate its impact on revenue, due to demands for more accountability and increasing pressure from executives. This is partly the result of the weak global economy. Theres a high- intensity need to get revenue, Qaqish says. Its been a hard few years. Thats why marketing and sales must look for ways to align what they do more closely. To begin with, marketing and sales need to think of themselves as a single revenue function. This requires them, for instance, to agree on a common definition of what a

lead is and jointly define what qualifies as an A, B, C, and D level lead. The two organizations should define a few simple lead qualification and scoring questions that can tell them how hot a prospect is (with A being the hottest, or most likely to transact quickly, and D being the coolest). This lead scoring enables marketers to determine whether prospects are fundamentally good fits (right titles, right geographies, right types of companies), and then to determine, based on those prospects online behaviors, how close they are to actually transacting. The marketing team should make it a high priority to act more as a service provider to sales. If marketing spots activity that shows a prospect has become more likely to buy (such as a prospects attending a webinar, actively engaging with the corporate web site, or downloading of product datasheet), that information should be transmitted to sales. Prospects in the awareness or consideration stagesin other words, not yet ready to transact should be targeted for more nurturing, meaning they should be alerted to any new marketing materials (whitepapers or research, for instance) that may be of interest to them. If they re-engage in a more active way, the marketing system sends an alert to the sales department. The emergence of cloud-based CRM and marketing systems puts companies in a position where this sort of marketing-sales collaboration is finally possible. But its still difficult to carry off. The problem is that most companies buy separate sales and marketing systems, from separate vendors, treating them as point solutions to be integrated later. At best, this adds cost, support and integration issues to the challenge of connecting marketing to sales.

At worst, the use of multiple systems removes the advantages the sales and marketing departments were seeking in the first place. Oracle has solved this problem by delivering cloud based CRM solutions that integrate best-in-class marketing and sales as a blended applicationone integrated software stack with a single data model. We think this is a huge, huge win for the VP of sales and the VP of marketing, says Anthony Lye, senior vice president of CRM at Oracle. The VP of sales will now have his reps focus on higher value leads, and the VP of marketing can now deliver more qualified leads. Qaqish agrees that Oracles cloud based CRM solutions give Oracle an advantage over standalone marketing automation companies. Everybody else has to do integration with CRM, Qaqish says. They are the first company that really owns both ends of the spectrum. While a lot of marketing automation companies do the integration quite well, Qaqish adds, its not the same thing as being one vendor, with one cohesive revenue platform.
ABOUT ORACLE Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the #1 global CRM provider, with the widest range of on-premise and on-demand applicationsall backed by single-vendor hosting and management capabilities, plus the domain and industry expertise that comes with deploying more than 4.6 million live CRM users. With more than 30 years of experience and innovation in enterprise software, customers trust Oracle for their technology, middleware, and applications needs. To learn more, visit http://www.oracle.com/goto/marketing

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