Earlier this week I had the same conversation I have with prospective customers over and over again: “We have a lack of cooperation between the sales and marketing teams — how do we align their initiatives to create a sales funnel where both organizations contribute and are accountable for driving revenue?”
It’s comments like these that drive home the point that over 80% of B2B organizations acknowledge a lack of synergy between the sales and marketing organizations according to a just released study from the Aberdeen Group: “Lead Lifecycle Management: Building a Pipeline that Never Leaks.”
This is one area where the implementation of the right marketing automation tool can actually force sales and marketing to work together and focus battling the competition and not each other. The research showed that Best in Class (BIC) organizations were almost twice as likely to use lead management tools compared to Laggard organizations.
And from my perspective, when it really comes down to it, Lead Lifecycle Management is all about more sales via better lead management through automation! The need to increase sales is the driver and the solution is automating the lead generation process.
The report found that top pressures driving change in demand generation processes are: Increase top line revenue (62%); increase lead to sales rate (55%); and increase the return on marketing investments (30%).
With regard to automation, the top two strategies being employed by companies to improve the bottom line are segmentation for more effective targeting and the development of formal nurturing programs. Aberdeen’s research also found that BIC organizations are more likely to embrace strategies to segment and target more effectively (60%) and develop formal nurturing programs (45%)as compared to Lagers with (43%) and (35%) respectively.
Aberdeen provides some real world guidance to help your organization develop more effective lead management programs. Bottom line: companies need to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles and increase revenue. Neither marketing nor sales can do this alone.
Tags: aberdeen group, alignment, BtoB, Nurturing
January 19th, 2010 at 7:13 am
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