Before and after: sales and marketing in the cloud

POSTED BY CLARK HAUSMANN, ASTADIA, INC. ON FEBRUARY 1, 2010

It may surprise you to learn that cloud computing is enabling the intersection of sales and marketing.

I commented earlier on an important transformation of the working relationship between marketing and sales. And on how Cloud technologies are enabling better conversations and better results for both sales and marketing. 

How does the conversation between sales and marketing change with Cloud tools?

Here’s what I’ve seen and heard. 

Some companies implement CRM alone. That is step 1.  Leads can now come in from the website to sales pretty easily. And there’s some visibility to campaign tracking.  You might be able to see what upcoming campaigns look like.  You may be able to do some process and workflow automation between marketing and sales. 

But when you overlay marketing automation, now there’s so much more functionality for outbound marketing, email marketing, lead scoring.  You couldn’t do that before.  Now sales people say, “I LOVE my marketing department.  Look at all the stuff they’re delivering for me.” 

As a sales guy, I hear people who work for these companies and say, “You know what? I’m not going to work anywhere in sales unless they have these two things.  If they have marketing automation and CRM in place, I know I’m going to be getting higher quality leads, sales ready leads. I can be a lot more effective in doing my job. If they don’t have those two things working, it’s going to be a lot harder.” 

Marketing people are saying similar things, like “The sales team is actually closing the leads I’m sending to them. I’m not getting hit over the head for turning over junk leads. Sure, a few are going to sneak through, but for the most part they’re good.” 

I think both sides feel better about their jobs and the results they’re achieving.  But the key is, when does a sales person say they love their marketing department? That doesn’t happen very often unless marketing is truly delivering high quality, sales ready leads.  And we’re hearing that, but not from the companies that don’t have these two technologies. 

You still need the people to execute.  Activity breeds results; you still have to do things to make that happen.  Otherwise it’s just a system.