Marketing And Sales: Partners For Success

Marketing and sales go together like peanut butter and jelly: while separately both are good, when working together they create something great. A company relies on both its marketing and sales departments in order to operate a successful business. Marketing is responsible for attracting and nurturing prospects throughout the buying cycle, while sales must effectively sell the product to these leads in an overall process referred to as ?lead management.? It only makes sense that these two departments need to form a fluid partnership in order to effectively manage leads throughout the buying cycle. Yet many companies experience a problematic disconnect between sales and marketing. This disconnect results from a lack of consistent communication and can have an adverse affect on a company?s bottom line. Companies in both consumer and business-to-business (B2B) industries experience a disconnect between marketing and sales. On the B2B side, where often the majority of sales stem from a solid lead management strategy, the sales-marketing disconnect can prove disastrous. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) leader Vocalocity is one such B2B company to experience this disconnect firsthand. Vocalocity has a robust influx of high quality leads that are immediately ready to go to sales. As a result, many older leads were falling by the wayside and going cold. Marketing and sales were unable to work together to form an effective lead management strategy for prioritizing and following up with leads due to a time-consuming manual follow-through process. Something needed to change. Vocalocity decided to coordinate their marketing and sales efforts with the help of automated lead management software. The company needed a tool that could form a closed-loop lead management circuit between sales and marketing to prevent leads from falling through the cracks. Top marketing automation provider Marketo delivered a lead management solution to meet Vocalocity?s unique requirements with its comprehensive features: ? Ease-of-use ? Quick implementation ? Functionality ? Ability to support a seamless lead cycle ? Vision for future success Vocalocity was able to heal the disconnect between its sales and marketing department with Marketo?s lead management software. Its automated functionality delivers the right leads at the right time to the right department, and makes it easy to follow up effectively with every lead. The automation process improves marketing and sales efficiency to reduce costs. The cohesive lead management strategy increases revenue. The relationship between sales and marketing is critical to business success. A solid, open partnership between these two departments can increase sales and drive overall profits.