Understand how marketers are leveraging innovative techniques to build bridges with sales and IT, to ultimately deliver quantifiable corporate value.

There is a new spirit of collaboration and cooperation sweeping across marketing departments as organisations accept the need to leave the traditionally dysfunctional relationship between sales, marketing and IT in the past.

Over the past decade both marketing and sales have leveraged increasing sophistication and highly innovative technology to improve effectiveness. But the techniques have been used in isolation, leaving IT out of the equation. As a result, neither sales nor marketing is operating at peak effectiveness and both are potentially undermining the success of the other.

But times are changing. Marketers are now adopting highly integrated sales and marketing technologies with the help of the IT department to create an excellent feedback loop throughout the sales and marketing cycle -- from the quality of leads to measuring their value throughout the sales cycle.

By providing this complete feedback loop, marketing can now truly maximise the value of sophisticated, targeted and graded lead generation activity and provide sales with the leads required to achieve a quantifiable sales uplift -- to the benefit of the entire organisation.

Wasted leads
Despite increasing sophistication in both marketing and sales techniques, from sophisticated lead generation to CRM driven improvements in customer understanding, organisations have struggled to forge greater cooperation between the two teams. Indeed, according to a recent study by the Aberdeen Group, 90 per cent of marketing generated leads are simply not followed up by the sales team.

The clear disconnect between the basic definition of what constitutes a good lead from marketing and what offers real value to sales continues to cause friction. As a result, with no way of documenting whether or not a lead has been followed up, how it was progressed and whether or not it resulted in a quantifiable sales uplift, adding sophistication to the lead allocation process is, in itself, not delivering enough added corporate value.

Marketing teams are understandably frustrated, believing that high quality leads are not being exploited. It is therefore no surprise that innovative marketing directors are increasingly looking to foster strong relationships with the sales team to transform effectiveness and support corporate objectives. Today there is a very real appetite for change and the support from IT is needed to make it work.

Working together
Sales and marketing teams have a common goal and creating a simple feedback loop from sales to marketing on the quality and relevance of leads is transformational.

The creation of a formal process for the acceptance or rejection of leads allows very specific criteria to be set up upon which the lead is measured. Each sales person can evaluate the lead based on budget, fitness to the product or timescale of the opportunity. This approach changes the evaluation of a good lead from subjective to objective, and ensures the lead generation activity ties in tightly with targeted sales campaigns.

The only way to achieve this cooperation is to engage the IT department and use highly integrated technology solutions so each salesperson can be provided with detailed history on the lead generation process and an opportunity to accept or reject each lead -- with attached justification.

Organisations also have the ability to track each sales person's lead acceptance/utilisation. This ensures any leads that have not been followed up are escalated to sales managers. Good leads are no longer wasted, poor leads are passed back to marketing and each salesperson is now accountable for his/her use of leads.

With this formal evaluation and acceptance process, sales and marketing now have an agreed basis upon which to work, fostering closer cooperation towards the common corporate goal.

Closing the loop
The approach is straightforward, but in a fast paced, highly challenging sales environment, this feedback can only be achieved if it becomes an accepted part of sales activity. By tying in tools to the increasingly standard sales force automation systems, such as salesforce.com and Siebel, organisations can begin to close the loop.

Integrating this information provides feedback to marketers on both the use -- or not -- of each lead and also its eventual contribution to the overall sales process. From pipeline forecasts onwards, marketing can now effectively quantify the impact of each campaign on the overall sales uplift, enabling lead generation to be refined and tailored to maximise value.

Furthermore, the integration enables marketing to provide each salesperson with access to relevant marketing material such as product sheets, white papers and case studies to aid the sales process. This ensures marketing improve control over the use of the most up to date material, supporting brand consistency and the correct alignment of the marketing message.

Critically, it is also provides the sales organisation with clear guidelines on how the marketing input and materials align to customers and when they should be used at each point during the key customer milestones, from initial contact to close of sale.

By continually auditing the use of these materials, marketing has the additional feedback required to further refine its supporting material and deliver information that is truly effective in the sales process.

Changing goals
By using IT to create a tightly integrated sales and marketing function, organisations can successfully define collaborative processes that meet the needs of the business and create far more precise incentives. Today's measurement of marketing on lead generation activity alone is, obviously, far from relevant given the fact that less than 10 per cent are actually followed up.

With an integrated approach and strong feedback loop, organisations can incentivise marketing to create far more specific leads, such as those within key accounts, to ensure the entire sales and marketing activity is closely aligned with business strategy.

Furthermore, with real time insight into the effectiveness with which sales organisations and individuals -- both direct and partner -- are converting leads, marketing can embrace increasingly sophisticated lead generation allocation processes.

And this is key: the sales organisation comprises many distinct groups and individuals -- it is a complex entity. Using an integrated feedback loop to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different parts of the sales function, the marketing organisation can ensure leads are far more effectively allocated to enable both groups to work together to achieve maximum value.

David Arrowsmith is marketing director at Aprimo.