Supercharging Revenues: Integrate Sales, Marketing and IT

Several representatives from our company have attended three big conferences this year: The Forrester Marketing Forum, the Forrester IT Forum and most recently, Dreamforce in San Francisco. The takeaway from the first two conferences was clear: if you want to be a player in tomorrow’s business world you better find a way to integrate marketing and IT. The takeaway from the Dreamforce conference was equally clear: if you want to be a player in tomorrow’s business world you better find a way to integrate sales and marketing.

So just imagine how powerful your revenue machine would be if you could integrate all three functions: sales, marketing and IT. This would have significance for both the B2C and B2B worlds, but it could literally supercharge the new business process for many B2B companies.

Marketing and IT have often had difficulty getting along because they speak such a different language. However, the role of both is often to enable communication to either internal or external audiences. This is a mission-critical overlap.

Sales and marketing are often separated by a gulf, too. Marketing frequently takes a long view and focuses on the brand, while sales typically has a more fast-paced, day-to-day outlook. In addition, sales and marketing programs in many cases differ in the way they compensate people (commission vs. salary) and how each measures success (weekly/monthly sales vs. quarterly/yearly results).

If you could achieve integration between sales, marketing and IT, there would be some tremendous advantages:

• You would be able to plan marketing, advertising and PR activities that develop and nurture leads.
• You would easily know what marketing activities are generating awareness and results.
• You would have tools to manage campaigns.
• You would be able to gain insights from campaigns to fine tune future efforts.
• It would help you determine the best combination of features, benefits, offers, etc. to create maximum effect.
• You would be able to determine the most promising market segments and the best timing to reach them.
• It would help automate certain aspects of your marketing and sales program.
• It would help you score leads to make the best use of precious sales resources.
• A wide variety of needed information would be available anytime and anywhere.
• You could zero in your creative briefs based on behaviors rather than educated guesses or soft data.

The lofty goal of integrating sales, marketing and IT has often been the intent of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Unfortunately, until recently the road to a CRM solution for many companies has been fraught with difficulties, time delays and cost overruns. Fortunately, new Software as a Service (SaaS) systems such as the rapidly expanding Salesforce.com platform and the Microsoft Titan platform will open up sophisticated CRM possibilities for many more companies (disclosure: Sundog is a registered consulting partner for the Salesforce platform). There is also more SaaS competition in the works from other big players such as Oracle/Siebel and SAP.

Competition is what creates legitimacy in a any market, so it is obvious the SaaS-type platform is going to be a big part of CRM’s growth and widespread adoption. And with it, will hopefully come the possibility of integrating sales, marketing and IT into a powerful business triumvirate for present and future success.