This CRM tip comes courtesy of Lorena Gilbert of PwC, who is speaking at our CRM 2012 event, March 19-22 in Orlando, FL!

Key challenges for marketing and sales
•Poor alignment with Sales
 Different views of leads between marketing and sales
 Unfocused and undefined marketing and sales effort
 Not enough focus on the right customers, rather than those who don’t respond or are less profitable

•Poor lead generation
 Metrics for judging marketing lead generation are often based on quantity, not quality
 Difficulty pushing leads to sales in timely manner

•Leads are not qualified correctly
 Raw and unqualified leads are passed to sales
 Can mean lost efficiency resulting in high cost of sales
 Leads to inaccurate sales forecasts

•Difficulty in determining ROI measurements on lead activities
 Numerous lead source processes not standardized
 Poor linkage between lead and opportunities
 No closed loop between sales and marketing

Closing the gap – key concepts

Leverage campaigns to generate leads
 Use marketing campaigns to execute programs which generate demand for your product or service

Understand and target your ideal customers
 Build a profile of a top customer based on attributes of your most successful customers

Collaborate to establish a common definition of a lead
 Consider customer profile, long-term value and profitability

Use lead qualification to determine readiness of the lead
 Objective is to pass high quality leads to the sales workforce

Establish closed-loop feedback between marketing and sales
 Track hand-offs with complete with history of where the lead went, action taken and results

Track and share performance results
 Marketing and sales can share a vision and alignment on goals, strategies, tactics, and metrics