101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead Playing on the same team to generate leads and drive revenue Marketing and Sales Alignment VOLUME FOUR P R E S E N T E D B Y P R E S E N T E D B Y 10 Tips for Marketing and Sales Alignment: Marketing and Sales are on the same team, right? Then why does it seem that they just cannot get along. With the latest sales force and marketing automation technologies, the communication gap between Sales and Marketing should be closing. When Marketing and Sales teams are aligned to the same goals, communication opens, the number of quality leads increases and ultimately revenue goes up. In this collection of 10 Marketing and Sales Alignment tips from The B2B Lead, you will find information on lead scoring, defining a lead and much more. Here’s a few of the included tips in this eBook: • Use Lead Scoring to Identify Sales-Ready Leads • Marketing Metrics to Drive Sales • Practical Strategies to Building Sales-Marketing Alignment • Using Sales Wins Analysis for Focused Lead Generation If you like what your see here, be sure to check out theb2blead.com for more B2B Marketing and Sales tips. Content contributed by: Amy Hawthorne, Director of Marketing at ReachForce Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company, Marketo Suaad Sait, CEO at ReachForce Cody Young, Sr. Director of Customer Success at ReachForce 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead VOLUME THREE • Event Marketing 2 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 3 Table of Contents Marketing and Sales Alignment 1. Here’s Why Marketing and Sales Can’t Get Along 2. What is Marketing’s #1 Job? 3. Practical Strategies to Building Sales-Marketing Alignment 4. Defining a Lead 5. Marketing Metrics to Drive Sales 6. Using Sales Wins Analysis for Focused Lead Generation 7. Use Lead Scoring to Identify Sales-Ready Leads 8. Using Surveys for Lead Scoring 9. Easy to Take Lead Scoring Surveys Help Drive High Response Rates 10. The Integrated Revenue Cycle: A New Model for Sales and Marketing 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 4 Here’s Why Marketing and Sales Can’t Get Along The gap between marketing and sales teams has been around since the two functions were created and is usually just accepted as an irreparable inconvenience in many busi- nesses. Sales thinks only they are worried about the quarter; Marketing thinks they are the only ones who think strategically. Sales wonder why they have to generate all their own leads; Marketing complains that sales ignores or criticizes everything they generate. Sales thinks marketing is lightweight and easy; Marketing thinks salespeople will say anything to get a deal. It is time for this fighting to stop. As the spread of the internet and social media transform the B2B buying process, aligning the warring departments has never been more critical to driving revenue and growth. And stopping the fighting begins by understanding the real and significant differences between the two functions. There are a number of factors on which marketing and sales differ, including timeframes, goals, and ways of showing value. While marketers look months and even years down the road as they seek to develop a brand and grow broad interest in their company, sales is laser-focused on hitting their numbers for the here and now. Each viewpoint meets a distinct and valid business need, but these contrasting views lead to conflicting perceptions of what contributes to the overall success of the business. It also means that marketing and sales tend to attract different skill sets and risk profiles, which exacerbates the “us versus them” mentality and makes it harder to appreciate the other’s disciplines. The dissonance is further intensified by the feeling among marketers that they are treated as second-class citizens while sales gets the glory (and the incentive-based compensa- tion). The value of a new sales win is immediately quantifiable as new revenue, but marketing is often seen as a cost center because its impact on revenue isn’t made explicit. (Marketers often exacerbate this by focusing too much on measuring activity instead of outcomes; while it’s easy to measure sales outcomes but hard to measure sales activity, the opposite is true in marketing.) What to do about it? Put simply, these difference means that Sales is from Mars, and Marketing is from Venus. Therefore, they key to closing the gap between marketing and sales is not to slam the two groups into one function under one leader, as some pundits advise. And it’s not to force marketers to behave more like salespeople, with aggressive quotas and huge variable compensation. Instead, the answer is to recognize that marketing and sales bring different strengths to the revenue process, and to find ways to get the best out of each function in a coordinated, efficient process. In my next guest post, I’ll share my six keys to building a happy marriage between sales and marketing, so stay tuned! 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 5 What is Marketing’s #1 Job? Marketing’s number one job should be lead generation with measurable impact to top-line revenue, right? I bet that’s what most CEOs and Sales Executives would say. So why do other departments still think of us as the ones who order the t-shirts and go to cool events? And these are the nice comments made, ask a few sales guys what they think of market- ing and I’m sure you’ll get a variety of not so nice answers. According to the CMO Council, 38% of CMOs say that aligning and integrating sales and marketing is a top priority this year. But, only 30% have a clear process or program to make this priority a reality. I think the real question here is - why is it only a priority for 38%? For Marketing to have a clear impact on revenue, they must be aligned with Sales. I believe there are three important factors for healthy Marketing and Sales alignment: 1. Marketing’s goals (and bonuses) are tied to the same goals as Sales – e.g. bookings and new customers acquired 2. Clear definition of a lead and when leads should be passed to Sales 3. A closed loop process that allows Sales teams to push leads not ready for Sales back to Marketing for ongoing nurture programs. When Sales and Marketing share the same goals, they have to work together. Neither will be successful if they do not communicate openly and collaborate to reach their goals. The breakdown typically starts with the definition if a lead. With Sales constantly asking for more leads, it is no wonder that many Marketers are forced to get new contacts any way they can (website registrations, event attendees or just buying a list) and then just throw them over the wall to Sales. More is better, right? Not necessarily in this case. Instead, Market- ers should warm all new contacts through an email, direct mail or webinar campaign to gauge their “sales readiness”. This enables Sales to focus on only the warm/hot leads while Marketing continues to educate those that aren’t ready to buy just yet. Through this process Marketing should also be able to weed out companies and contacts that are not a fit for the business allowing for more productivity and efficiency on your sales team. The ideal scenario is to build a funnel together with Sales and define the stages of it and the specific hand-off point of a lead – a unified funnel is the ONLY approach to creating a win-win for the business. 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 6 Practical Strategies to Building Sales-Marketing Alignment I recently wrote about why sales and marketing can’t get along. Here are some practical tips to start bridging the gap! 1. Model the entire revenue cycle. As opposed to a standalone sales cycle, focus on an integrated revenue cycle that starts from the day you first meet a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. This helps each team understand what the other is doing, and how their actions help facilitate revenue. 2. Develop a common vocabulary. Part of an integrated revenue cycle is common definitions for each stage. When marketing sits down with sales and says, “what is the definition of a good sales lead, and how can we help?” the dynamic between the two departments changes. With the definition of sales-ready in hand, marketing can begin rebuilding trust by delivering leads that meet that definition. This common language and metrics is essential for communication between the functions. 3. Look for operational disconnects. Too often, sales energy and promotions are focused in a different direction than marketing’s most recent campaigns. In some cases, they can even be in conflict! In one example, the sales team had an incentive to sell a product that marketing was planning to discontinue in the next month. Make sure that initia- tives and promotions are aligned by developing plans jointly and meeting monthly or at least quarterly. 4. Create a closed-loop reporting process. Marketing needs to have a way to follow-up with sales to see how well leads are performing. This can be a field in the CRM system, a regular call, or even an automated survey. Just make sure it’s easy for the rep to respond. It can be as basic as sending the rep an email two weeks after receiving a lead with the subject “Was lead ABC good?” This way, they can simply reply “Yes” or “No”, which they can easily do on their Blackberry or in a hotel room. Closing the loop like this can help tune lead generation efforts, and is an important way to take qualified prospects that are not yet sales ready and recycle them back into marketing for lead nurturing. 5. Share accountability between the teams. Marketing is a very measurable process, but the results are head to measure; it’s easy to measure Sales outcomes but Sales activity is hard to measure. As a result, compensation and rewards tend to be very different, which creates further problems. So be sure to review how each team is compensated and rewarded to ensure alignment. (One typical disconnect: marketing focuses on the number of new deals while sales is focused on the amount and size of the total pipeline.) The better your ability to measure marketing ROI, the easier it is to bridge this gap. 6. Foster respect and trust. Perhaps most importantly, In particular, building alignment between marketing and sales organizations starts with a common set of values and shared beliefs. If the two functions don’t fundamentally believe the other has the same set of goals in mind, it will be much more difficult to drive alignment. This is rooted in good and regular communication, but it can be challenging to repair years of miscommunication all at once. Start by focusing on small wins (for example, look for a particular rep who closed a big deal because of a marketing lead) and promote the result aggressively. By having a “victory parade” for small wins, you will begin the process of better communi- cation and trust. 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 7 Defining a Lead Note the perspective in this blog bite assumes the following: Lead generation is about delivering high quality targeted opportunities to sales to accelerate revenue. I have spent several years listening people complain about the following: Sales: Marketing does not know what they are doing, their leads are bad Marketing: Sales is not smart enough to follow-up on our leads The crux of the problem, in my view is the definition of a lead and metrics that are used to measure marketing success. My opinion, 2 things you should consider: 1. Get WRITTEN buy-in from sales on definition of a lead 2. Compensate marketing not on generating volume of leads but the number of leads that sales “accepts” – based on #1 (compensation tied to revenue is ALSO key) So what is a lead? I like Sirius Decisions framework. It’s a good place to start, then you can adapt for your business: 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 8 Marketing Metrics that Drive Sales B2B marketing is all about driving sales, right? The most effective teams know that alignment of marketing and sales is a requirement for productive lead generation and customer growth. We’ve had sales pipeline metrics in place forever, I sometimes wonder why we as Marketers got to skate along all this time with no accountability…that’s a post for another day maybe… With today’s sales force automation and marketing automation solutions, we as Marketers are now able to prove our worth with every campaign or program we launch. Here’s a few metrics we here at ReachForce track to ensure we are driving valuable sales activity and customer growth. • # of net new companies from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week • # of net new contacts (right role, not just anyone) from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week • # of contacts being touched with a marketing message each week; net new contacts vs. those in nurture programs (and of course, we track opens and click throughs) • # of inbound requests • # of people hitting a landing page, then jumping to corporate site for product/service info. (we do newsletter and search engine advertising driving people to best practice content accessible via a landing page) • # of people originating at The B2B Lead (ReachForce blog) and jumping to the ReachForce corporate site (product pages, solution pages) • # of new sales meetings set from marketing lead generation programs • # of marketing leads moved to the qualification stage of our sales pipeline • # of marketing leads moving to a proposal, and of course closing Once a new customer is onboard I then go back and identify what activities were involved in moving this lead to being a new customer so I can be sure to do more of it. Now of course there is a list of metrics similar to this for each initiative you take on. It’s always important to outline goals and expectations of each program so that you are sure to spend your time and resources on the best producing programs. Do you measure anything not on this list? If so, please share. 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 9 Using Sales Wins Analysis for Focused Lead Generation Do you know your best customers? Can you easily identify your sweet spot-the vertical markets in which you sell the most or the fastest? Are there other business buyers in your sweet spot that you should be targeting? If you can’t answer these questions but wish you could, follow the five steps below to gain insight into your sales funnel. Five Steps to Effective Laser-Targeted Lead Generation Using Sales Win Analysis The following five-step process gives you a roadmap for fast and efficient Sales Wins Analysis. By following this path, you will be able to eliminate false starts and quickly identify top performing vertical markets so that you can execute laser focused programs that produce a higher response rate, more sales conversions and faster pipeline velocity. Step 1: Review and categorize the opportunities in your Marketing and Sales pipeline. Effective Sales Wins Analysis begins with a thorough review of your Marketing and Sales pipeline including open opportunities and closed deals from current and previous years. By analyzing both the size of the deals, as well as the velocity of those deals as they move through the pipeline, and categorizing those deals into distinct market sectors, you can begin to identify markets that are producing the most revenue for your organization. To get started, compile customer account data from your CRM system and build a data model that answers the following questions: • In which vertical market segments am I closing the most deals? • In which vertical market segments are deals closing the fastest? • What other vertical market segments share similar characteristics? Step 2: Build a profile of your top accounts. After identifying the most lucrative target markets for your product or service, you will want to discover additional prospect accounts in those markets with characteristics that are similar to your best buyers. These prospects will undoubtedly have the highest propensity to buy from you, so target your Lead Generation programs at this group first. Consider the following when building your profile: Qualification Criteria: Profile your best customers to define a set of three to five common characteristics that will serve as qualifying criteria for identifying new prospects. Look at company revenues, locations, number of employees and other easy to find data. Do most of your customers fall into the Fortune 1000-size range? Are more deals closing faster in the Small and Medium-size business sector? Is the number of employees a critical success factor? Are there key trends you can identify in certain industries that are driving the need for your product? For example, you may find that you close more deals quickly with organizations that have revenue greater than $500,000,000 USD and global operations 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 10 with a minimum of five locations. If so, use these as minimum qualification criteria for selecting your new prospects in your best vertical markets. Then make sure you capture this type of data for all new leads so that you can better qualify the leads you provide to Sales. The Customer Buy Cycle: Next, map the buy cycle for your best customers to identify and describe the roles and responsibilities for the decision-maker, economic buyer, end-user, and other key players in the buying process. The number of roles depends upon the number of people typically involved in the buying process. You’ll want to understand their roles both in the buying cycle and within the organization. Make sure you phone screen a sample of these targets to understand the responsibilities for each of your buyers. This will give you the insight to produce high impact Marketing messages and a strong call to action for your multi-modal Marketing campaigns. Step 3: Identify additional target accounts in your top markets. You now have a blueprint of the best possible prospects for your business. Apply that blueprint to the universe of buying organizations in your top vertical markets to hand pick the best possible targets for your Direct Marketing campaigns. While these companies have not yet purchased from you, they share many of the same characteristics of your best customers, and therefore will likely have a higher propensity to purchase your products or services. Step 4: Conduct Contact Discovery to identify the right buyers in your target accounts. With your target Accounts list compiled, you’ll need to identify prospects in the right roles within these companies. Make sure you verify more than just contact information and titles. To ensure you are getting to the right buyers as quickly as possible, identify your prospective buyers by their role in the organization and more importantly the buying process. Survey a sample of your contacts on their pain points, decision drivers, triggers, and trusted information sources. Gather as much information as you need to capture your pros- pects’ attention and communicate your value to them. Step 5: Execute a multi-modal marketing campaign to deliver the right message to the right buyers. Multi-modal Direct Marketing involves a carefully executed campaign that delivers targeted messages to buyers using their preferred means of communication. Not all buyers like to receive product information in precisely the same way, so it’s best to tailor your messages based on your buyers’ preferences. In fact, a recent Marketing Sherpa research project surveying 3000 IT buyers and vendors demonstrated that B2B Decision-makers or Executive-level buyers prefer to learn more about products via Webinars, whereas Contributors or End-users prefer white papers. Map out and execute your multi-modal campaign focusing on key vertical pain points with messages that appeal to each of your target roles. Start with an offer that requires a low commitment to respond like a white paper download and work your way up to a more involved call to action such as a product demo. Ongoing Marketing and Sales Pipeline Monitoring With this five-step process for Sales Win analysis, you’ll be able to laser-target your Lead Generation programs to produce more impressive Marketing metrics, align your demand generation programs with Sales, and improve your funnel efficiency by driving greater revenue faster. Keep in mind, however, that just as customers and markets evolve, your Marketing programs must transform accordingly. This is why it is important to conduct Sales Wins Analysis at least quarterly so that you can monitor your pipeline closely to uncover new opportunities and spot trends. Maintaining visibility into your Marketing and Sales funnel will give you the insight you need to boost Marketing results and revenue. All of this sound a bit daunting? No worries, check out our Insight Lite product on the salesforce.com AppExchange: Or Schedule a Demonstration of ReachForce Insight Pro version and analyze not only your customer win data but also in funnel opportunities for trends. 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 11 Use Lead Scoring to Identify Sales-Ready Leads Most leads from B2B marketing campaigns are still researching. Prematurely passing these early leads to sales only annoys the buyer and makes sales even less likely to follow-up on marketing leads. This means the majority of inquiries require further lead nurturing before they become sales ready, so marketers also need the ability to know when to try to nudge the prospect to the next stage and when to pull back and give the prospect some space. This is where lead scoring comes in. Lead scoring is the process of determining a prospect’s level of interest in your solution (engagement), as well as your interest in a prospect (demographics targeting). When used effectively, lead scoring means you will pass fewer, but higher quality, leads to sales. By not wasting sales time on low quality leads, reps can focus on just the high quality leads — meaning wins rates and sales productivity go up. In fact, as little as a 10% increase in lead quality can generate a 40% increase in sales productivity. In a world where the sales department costs equal 20 or 30% of total revenue, this kind of improvement means a dramatic impact on the bottom line. How can you use lead scoring to achieve this kind of benefit for your organization? First of all, too many companies use only basic demographic data (e.g. title, company size, etc.) in scoring. This is useful, but demographic data only tell how interested you are in the prospect—and nothing about how interested the prospect is in you. Even BANT criteria (budget, authority, timing, and need) have limited usefulness since buyers’ answers to those questions are notoriously inaccurate, and as we all know, people’s actions speak louder than their words. This means you should also track a lead’s behaviors so you can you measure their interest and engagement in your solution. Begin by monitoring and tracking online behaviors, such as email responses, completed forms, and Web site visits. You can do this manually with web analytics, or automate the process using marketing automation software. Assign a point value to each, just as you would assign a value to each job title. Certain behaviors – such as using your company brand name in a search, visiting your pricing page, or returning frequently to your site – indicate higher readiness to buy, so assign even higher weights to those behaviors. Since B2B purchases typically involve 6 to 21 different people, add up the scores for each contact at a given company to measure the total level of engagement for that organization. Finally, be sure to lower the score over time if engagement goes down. Review the point values with the sales team, and decide what score indicates sales-readiness. If the sales team determines a prospect is not yet ready, recycle the lead back to marketing for additional nurturing. Finally, be sure to close the loop and refine your scoring rules and point values over time for continuous improvement. Want more details? Here’s a link to a free eBook from Marketo called Best Practices in Lead Scoring. 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 12 Using Surveys for Lead Scoring Lead Scoring appears to be the newest tactic Marketers are using to better identify warm to hot leads for Sales. Marketing Automation vendors like Marketo are promoting lead rat- ing and lead scoring as a means to increase sales effectiveness and accelerate typical sales cycles. Both are measuring a contact’s interaction behaviors with marketing activities. But should a contact really be considered a hot lead if they open a few emails and visit your website a time or two? I think our Sales team might disagree here. At ReachForce, we are doing a little lead scoring of our own. Instead of analyzing prospect behaviors, we are going directly to them and asking them to participate in a survey. By gathering qualifying information directly from the prospect, our customers are able to better target their messaging at these new prospects. By enabling them to get to the right buy- ers, in the right companies, with the right message, they are seeing increased marketing results and sales conversions. Here are few tips we share with our customers when we’re building out a lead scoring survey. Lead Scoring surveys can quickly: 1. Qualify a company as a user of a certain technology or application – This type of question is to confirm if a prospect organization uses something that either compliments or competes with the survey sponsor’s offering. 2. Find out respondent status: decision maker, a part of a decision making team or a secondary influencer – This type of question is useful when setting the stage for a sales call or marketing campaign so messaging can be made as relevant and personalized as possible. 3. Find out how well the top 2‐3 product or service “key values” are recognized by each respondent – A “key value” is something that makes an offering better, unique or uncom- monly relevant to the prospect. This type of question is used to find out if they will “get” your value proposition, or if education or special messaging is required. 4. Measure how important key values are to each respondent – This follow up to Q3 is used to find out how important the respondent thinks the sponsor’s key values are. Com- bined scores to this set of questions are used to determine degree of interest and help make sales and marketing messaging relevant and personal when following up on the lead. 5. Determine budget – This type of question is used to pinpoint how much the respondents’ organization spends (and by implication would expect to spend next time) on offer- ings similar to what the sponsor sells. Paying close attention to scores that are too low help sales and marketing teams prioritize. 6. Confirm plan – This type of question helps find out when or how often the respondent is in the market for what the survey sponsor is selling. Questions like this can also be centered on finding trigger events (audits, budget planning, corporate initiatives) that create sales opportunity. 7. Establish time line or “window of sales opportunity” – By combining the responses to “Confirm plan” and this type of question, the result is normally a reliable indication of when the respondent’s organization will begin the buying cycle for what the survey sponsor is selling. The lead score you end up with for each prospect should help you to determine if the prospect can be immediately handed off to sales or put into a marketing campaign for further nurturing. 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 13 Easy to Take Lead Scoring Surveys Help Drive High Response Rates When developing lead scoring survey questions that effectively determine need, interest, timing and budget, remember these things: • Don’t over use industry jargon and acronyms when crafting the questions • Use simple and direct language • Avoid use of passive messaging and sales pitches • Offer as many multiple choice questions as possible • Randomize presentation of multiple choices to avoid bias • Design questions to maximize meaningful cross tab analysis • Use as few questions as possible For more info on lead scoring surveys check out my last post, Using Surveys for Lead Scoring. 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 14 The Integrated Revenue Cycle: A New Model for Sales and Marketing There’s always been a lot of drama around how marketing can best contribute to and improve the sales cycle. In fact, one common way to measure the effectiveness of a new mar- keting initiative is by looking for improvements in the sales cycle. Businesses have always focused on the sales cycle, so that’s the way to go, right? Wrong! Companies need to stop thinking only about the sales cycle and instead focus on what I call the “Revenue Cycle,” which starts from the day you first meet a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. The old model of a linear handoff from marketing to sales must give way to an intertwined model where both organiza- tions jointly own prospect relationships and coordinate their activities. To use an analogy, imagine a fighter jet that first ran with just the left engine, then turned that engine off and lit up the right engine. That’s pretty inefficient compared to lighting both engines and going full speed! Before defining the revenue cycle in more depth, it is worth examining why the traditional “sales cycle” is the wrong model for businesses to follow. The primary reason is that the sales cycle looks at only a portion of the complete revenue process, and this presents two main problems: • Looking at sales alone as the predictor of revenue is misleading – with sales only, companies can’t manage and guide growth beyond the current or subsequent quarter. The Sales cycle can usually predict revenue in the short term, but because the sales forecast is based on what a specific account will do at a specific time, it becomes increas- ingly inaccurate for predicting future revenue. Asking the sales organization — which by definition is focused on revenue in the near term — to predict revenue in future quarters is typically highly misleading. For this, a company should look to the function that is inherently focused on the long term: the marketing organization. • Inefficiencies are killing productivity and marketing budgets – without the right processes in place, sales is less effective and companies are wasting marketing budgets. The traditional model of a sales cycle that begins when sales accepts a marketing lead or contacts a prospect directly results in waste and inefficiency. It means as much as 50% of sales time is spent on unproductive prospecting, while reps simultaneously ignore 80% of marketing leads. We’ve estimated that the resulting lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget costs companies at least $1 trillion a year. The sales cycle mentality also ignores the fact that throughout the customer lifecycle (before, during, and after sales interacts with a prospect or customer), marketing has been and will continue to touch the prospect with marketing messages via the website, campaigns, advertising, and PR. So how do you start driving your business by managing the Revenue Cycle? The Revenue Cycle requires coordinating marketing and sales activities throughout the entire cycle to generate maximum impact. The key is to realize that marketing and sales bring different strengths to the process. Marketing brings a long-term view, sales brings an action-oriented view. Marketing is good at one-to-many communications, automated processes, and dealing with lots of data; sales is good at building personal relationships and leveraging the human touch. The Revenue Cycle must start from the day a company first meets a prospect and continue through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. As marketing and sales coor- dinate their activities as part of a unified Revenue Cycle, companies will get better at lead scoring and properly identifying and prioritizing opportunities. That creates better quality leads that result in easier and better quality sales cycles, with more wins and ultimately more revenue. While there will still be a time when primary ownership of a lead shifts, the Revenue Cycle eliminates the “handoff” from marketing to sales. Instead, both functions should be engaged in the right way throughout the entire Revenue Cycle: lead nurturing campaigns can come on behalf of the sales rep, marketing messages and the website can continue to support the sales process once sales does engage, and sales leads that go cold can be recycled back to marketing. With marketing and sales acting as equally important drivers of revenue, companies can gain a picture of the complete revenue process, ensuring that leads are properly nurtured and do not fall out of the cycle midway and get lost. Of course, truly replacing the sales cycle with a coordinated Revenue Cycle is easier said than done, but the benefits are clear: increased sales productivity, greater return on marketing spending, and better visibility into the long-term performance and health of the business. What company doesn’t want to be able to better predict revenue and grow their business? The shift won’t happen overnight, but the first step is changing our thinking and embracing the new model: the Revenue Cycle. 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 15 About ReachForce ReachForce delivers software (SaaS) and data services that enable B2B companies to laser target their lead generation programs. ReachForce solutions allow marketing and sales teams to target market ‘sweet spots’ using CRM and website visitor data then reach the right buyers in these companies using role-based contact discovery services. ReachForce was created to ensure Marketers, keep their seat at the table. As a team of long time Marketers we decided we were tired of it being ok to be wrong 97% of the time. With marketing response rate industry averages being less than 3%, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we as B2B Marketers have been driving lead generation initiatives. Response rates don’t equal leads and leads don’t always mean qualified buyers. At ReachForce, we don’t care about or measure response rates, we drive and measure revenue delivered to the business from lead generation initiatives. By addressing the founda- tion of any marketing program, the data - or “The WHO” as we call it, ReachForce was founded with one goal in mind: to provide businesses with revolutionary, high quality, cost- effective data to fuel their marketing and sales lead generation initiatives. About Marketo Marketo provides B2B sophisticated, yet easy marketing automation software that turns “clicks into customers” and translates marketing spend into revenue. Marketo’s award-win- ning marketing solutions provide email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and closed-loop reporting capabilities to help marketing and sales teams work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and demonstrate marketing accountability. Driven by a relentless focus on customer success and touting the most innovative user experience in business software today, Marketo is emerging as the fastest-growing lead management vendor in the world. Marketo’s on-demand marketing products are easy to buy because they don’t require complex implementation or upfront fees, easy to own because they don’t require IT support, and easy to use without specialized technical skills or significant training. Pricing starts as low as $1,500 a month, and qualified customers who commit to running a production campaign can get started with a free trial that includes set-up, training, and integration. About The B2B Lead We’ve designed The B2B Lead blog to deliver real world, practical B2B Sales and Marketing Tips to help you capture more qualified buyers and convert them into profitable customer relationships. Each week, we will deliver snack-size how-to’s and thought-provoking commentary from B2B Marketers for B2B Marketers. ReachForce customers–who include Directors of Marketing Communications, Sales Professionals, Marketing Programs Managers–and other guest writers will share techniques that help you take a more delib- erate and predictable approach to increasing the velocity and efficiency of the Marketing and Sales funnel. If you want to share ideas while learning from your peers, subscribe to our B2B Marketing RSS feed now. We hope you will make it your go-to resource for techniques to succeed in the new world of metrics-driven Marketing. 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead P R E S E N T E D B Y VOLUME FOUR • Marketing and Sales Alignment 16 This is the fourth of a five volume collection of B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead. Below are the past and upcoming volumes. To download all 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips, check back in the coming weeks. Volume One: Online Marketing Volume Two: Direct Marketing Volume Three: Event Marketing Volume Four: Marketing and Sales Alignment Volume Five: More Marketing and Sales Tips