Sales and Marketing 2.0

Late last year Denis Pombriant wrote an excellent article in CRM Buyer called Sales 2.0 and Marketing Too. He made the point that “Sales 2.0 is actually more about marketing than selling,” but “truth be told, many of the people who want closable leads, deals won and upward-trending graphs don’t want to be concerned with the details of attraction, nurturing and hand-off as a distinct process.”

Since then, the Sales 2.0 drumbeat has been fast and furious. Sales managers have also gotten into the act, realizing that metrics (not hunches) are the cornerstone of Sales Management 2.0. Maybe it’s the economy. It might have something to do with the market shift to cloud computing and SaaS. But most likely it’s simply the realization that competing without the right analytics is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

One of the Sales Operations Heroes in last week’s on-demand webinar went so far as to say:

“Having access to the right metrics/answers makes you look really smart - and allows you to anticipate business changes before they get the best of you!”

So what does this mean for the marketing department? Haven’t marketers always had to justify their expensive programs with data? Haven’t they always had to focus on feeding the sales team with leads? Yes. Well, yes but….

How many times have you heard this from the marketing department:

• “Sales has no appreciation for what we do?”
• “We hit our goal of generating [insert massive # here] leads last month. I don’t know what those sales guys are doing!”
• “Sales just doesn’t know how to sell the value.”
• “We’re spending our markeing dollars on SEO and events this quarter because that’s where we get the most leads”

For many companies the front-end of the sales funnel is often more like a “sales sieve” as marketing dollars are wasted on lead generation activities that don’t have a direct correlation to closed business. In the past, companies had to implement complex on-premise business intelligence solutions to get the insight required to align sales and marketing managers.

• Do you know where the bottlenecks are in your lead-to-close cycle? Where are leads getting stuck?
• Which sales reps have the best performance against their leads by region, industry and title?
• How can you close more deals without increasing marketing spend?

LucidEra Lead Insight is designed to help you know where your marketing leads actually lead. We’re going to be talking a lot more about optimizing the lead-to-opportunity-to-close-to-order process in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can find out more about today’s announcement here.

posted by Darren Cunningham at 5:18 am

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Nicole

Posted on 3rd July, 2008

Sales and marketing “2.0″ should be focusing on bottom-up approaches that take advantage of existing networks. Both sales and marketing people can benefit from using free networking sites geared towards the business community, like LinkedIn or http://www.octopuscity.com, to generate warmer leads and leverage relationships.