August 3, 2009

Mind the Gap: Narrowing the Chasm between Marketing and Sales

Posted by Eric Edwards

Marketing is undergoing a seismic shift in how business is being conducted. You could call it an inflection point.  Marketers are beginning to be recognized as pivotal players in their organization.  Some innovative marketing organizations are even beginning to be viewed as profit-centers vs. cost-centers.  Marketing Automation is helping change that perspective.

Marketo recently hosted a Webinar called Can Marketing Help Sales Sell? that investigates the collaboration between Marketing and Sales departments. Clearly, the MA industry has come a long way in the past five years.

A few years ago, marketing automation as we know it was in its infancy -primarily because the flexibility of the technology just wasn't there. The complexity of available solutions has evolved to include sophisticated implicit/explicit scoring, lead routing, prospect profiling, lead nurturing tracks and improved metrics.

Perhaps I look at this in a different manner because of my background in technology sales vs. corporate marketing (or the agency world).  Naively, early in my career, I believed that while sales was supposed to generate the vast majority of their own leads…. marketing was also instrumental in delivering “x” percent of high-value leads ready for follow-up.  I worked for numerous innovative organizations -including Symantec, Webtrends, NetIQ and CompuCom. Yet these innovative companies were lagging behind in the quantity and quality of their marketing sourced leads to sales.

About 12 years ago as an employee at Symantec, I had an interesting conversation with a member of the field marketing team.  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that innocuous conversation later proved to be a seminal moment in my career. I was tired of hearing how marketing was running great campaigns intended to fill the sales pipeline… then watching in dismay as my quota increased, with few marketing sourced opportunities coming my way.  So what did he tell me?  He flatly stated that his (Marketing’s) job was to “create compelling content and deliver it in a compelling fashion, not to be measured on the quantity and quality of leads that was being sourced to sales.” Ouch.

A few years later I was working at Webtrends. I decided to completely bypass corporate marketing altogether: instead of relying on Marketing to supply me with leads I decided to do it myself.  The result was staggering.  I was spending less and less time prospecting and found myself focused on the latter stages of the pipeline.  All of a sudden I was working fewer hours, closing larger opportunities. So management decided, “my patch was too rich,” and cut my territory in half… it didn’t matter.  It was then that I first started to really understand the power of marketing and sales working together in unison.   

My personal experience and the industry’s path are parallel. The Marketing Automation industry developed to narrow the chasm between marketing and sales, specifically addressing the quantity and quality of marketing sourced leads to sales.  In our early days my B2B organization focused heavily on implicit/explicit scoring, lead routing, prospect profiling and demand generation.  The challenge? Our recommendations, combined with the complexity of our client’s environments, made it nearly impossible to execute our recommendations manually. They had to be managed by technology.  

Things got going quickly. Four years ago the Marketing Automation solution space began cropping up with dozens of technology vendors including Eloqua, Market2Lead, Marketo and Silverpop. Today the solution space is crowded with competing vendors, skilled agencies and marketing gurus like Brian J. Carroll and Ardath Albee.

The potential for growth in the Marketing Automation industry is pretty amazing considering that only about 3% of the total available market has begun the adoption phase.  The rocket-paced growth over the past five years makes me wonder what the next five will bring.


About the Author: Eric Edwards is the president and founder of Rubicon Marketing Group in Portland, Oregon. As a sales professional, Eric was constantly exposed to the chasm between Sales and Marketing …a chasm which dramatically (and consistently) inhibited revenue growth. Eric has over 15 years of sales, marketing and business development experience, holding corporate sales and business development positions at WebTrends, NetIQ, Symantec and CompuCom Systems.  Eric attended Southern Methodist University, holds a MBA from The University of Portland and attended Stanford’s Executive Program for Growing Companies. Eric's professional training includes Solution and SPIN Selling.

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