"If I had to feed my children based on the marketing leads we are currently getting, they'd starve." That is what one sales executive told me during an initial prospect meeting. "If we sit by the phone waiting for prospects to call us, we are going to hear a lot of crickets." Companies invest enormous amounts of resources trying to fill their sales pipeline. Marketing produces more and more leads and passes them on to sales. Despite this, sales reps cannot close enough business to make their quota and companies don't meet their forecast. So what's the problem? Well marketing needs to stop producing large quantities of poorly qualified leads for the sales force. Instead, they should put their energy into nurturing a few, well-qualified buyers that sales people can convert into customers.

Too often, marketing teams generate large numbers of leads without giving enough thought or consideration as to whether:

• they are qualified
• in what stage in their buying cycle are
• or what the sales force does with them once they receive them

The reason for this is most marketing departments are measure by the number of leads they generate with no regard to the quality of those leads. Companies measure marketing on the number of leads it generates and its cost per lead instead of looking at the cost per sale. Part of the reason for this is that no one gives marketing the data they need to measure the ultimate results of the leads they produce for sales. Meanwhile we have the sales team, a group who by nature and by compensation focuses on near-term opportunities. They too often find the leads from marketing to be poorly qualified and therefore useless. As a result, sales are not held accountable for the good marketing leads that they receive.

Focus on Conversation and Quality

Effective lead generation is very much tied to overcoming these challenges in order to prioritize lead quality over lead quantity. Lead quality is critical to managing and improving bottom-line performance. Companies ultimately need better insight into the two primary dimensions of quality: average profit per sale and average conversion rates from lead to sale. By establishing closed-loop reporting and aligning sales and marketing automation systems, companies gain insight into lead quality and ROI, and the marketing team can leverage untapped opportunities with:

1. Better alignment of their spend to value potential
2. Improvements to marketing strategy
3. Better tracking and metrics
4. Earning buy-in from the sales organization

How to Align Sales and Marketing Automation Systems

While companies have been using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools for over 25 years, the relative new comer is Marketing Automation (MA) and it has become as vital to marketers as CRM is to sales. IT has become critical for these two systems can work together to create a close-loop reporting system. In order to align these two systems companies need to follow the following 5 steps:

1. Begin with a clear process.
   Map out how, what and when data will flow between systems. Can you imagine the magnitude if your MA system wrote over to CRM every time a prospect or client clicked on an email? What if your MA system wrote over to CRM every time a lead score changed? Not only would CRM be filled with junk, it would be a nightmare for the sales person who lives/works in CRM.
2. Establish common definitions.
   Within any data mapping session, set up common terms and definitions for CRM and MA to create a better working relationship. It is also important to make sure that there is a clear definition of how a marketing qualified lead is different from a sales qualified lead.
3. Focus on data quality and standardization.
   Fields like title, state and others need to be standardized so they can be leveraged in both systems and to avoid duplication. This focus on standardization ensures the right people get into the right campaigns; sales gets the lead they should be assigned and the lead is tracked the right way from cold name to close. It also helps with data purging, something marketers and sales are often slow to do.
4. Develop a clear understanding.
   With the wealth of insights that MA tools can provide, it's important to take time to ensure reps understand the data and how to use it. Don't assume they "get it." You need to help them understand the value of data and how to keep it clean on the sales end as well. This is especially important as sales work leads that need to be re-cycled back to marketing.
5. Establish dashboards and closed loop reporting across the two systems.
   Both CRM and MA tools have powerful reporting systems that help run the day-to-day as well as report up the 3-5 key metrics to senior management. The real value of having these two systems aligned with clear reporting is the ability to see and improve the overall effectiveness of the revenue engine with the revenue engine being defined as the combined efforts of both sales and marketing.

When aligned, CRM and MA provide a framework: a language and common set of goals based on revenue attainment to bridge this gap and build a highly efficient revenue engine for any organization. It also allows marketing to focus on providing more qualified leads that sales people look forward to acting on. And more importantly, the crickets stop chirping and allow sales people to feed their children from the leads that marketing generates.