Foster Collaboration with Sales

Lisa Arthur, Chief Marketing Officer, Teradata Applications, and John Petralia, Global Head of Marketing Operations, Bloomberg

Customers do about 60 percent of their research before they engage in inquiries of salespeople.  This is changing the nature of sales dramatically.  Sales people must integrate data in their processes, so they are better able to assist customers.  

Marketing needs to create an improved environment for sales by providing leads of high quality and quantity.  With better data, sales people can spend less time prospecting and their leads will be more efficient.  

The biggest challenge for sales and marketing is alignment of goals and metrics. Marketers who are not able to translate the value of marketing into business terms lose credibility, particularly in business-to-business markets.  Marketers are in a weaker position when they don't understand the bigger picture and can't facilitate improved sales performance.  

Technology can enable alignment by creating demand, increasing collaboration, and providing transparency and mapping the marketing sales to the buyer's cycle.  An active and ongoing dialogue between marketing and sales is essential.

Summary by Alicia Baik, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Economics, University of Virginia

Related Conference:

Marketing Resource Allocation: Moving from Analytics to Action