Revenue Strategies

In a world of digitally-empowered buyers equipped with the information and tools to make more informed purchase decisions, B2B organizations must rise to the challenge of interacting with customers in meaningful ways – and doing so across a constantly growing number of channels.

For sales and marketing teams, the name of the game here is alignment: Working towards the same goals, pursuing the same customer-facing strategies and measuring their progress against the same metrics. It's also more important than ever to provide content that speaks to buyer pain points, builds trust and keeps customers engaged.

By Jon Russo, Founder & CEO, B2B Fusion

It’s time for the next generation of marketing automation – a revenue-generating marketing automation system that focuses on predictability, effectiveness and a holistic view of a prospect/customer situation, using the right analytics. 

While B2B organizations have traditionally focused on mapping marketing automation to CRM systems, business success today hinges on the integration of many different tools and platforms. 

The 2012 Sales And Marketing Integration Awards highlight real-world organizational challenges, where companies dealt with extremely complex technology  integrations, such as: New marketing automation solutions with existing salesforce.com environments; migrating from legacy CRM and data sources; and rolling out additional integrations for everything from Microsoft Outlook to the latest web conferencing platforms.

The Awards report recognizes the winners’ ability to establish systematic, repeatable processes for success with definitions and blueprints to optimize their internal operations; and to create improved conversion rates deeper in the funnel with targeted and relevant content.

Nearly 75% of companies consider their CRM solution to be their sales process, and as a result are not optimizing their sales execution, according to a new poll conducted by SAVO Group. In addition, 68% of those that have implemented a separate, formal sales process did report an increase in revenue.

The results are from a live poll of 176 participants conducted during one of SAVO’s educational webinars, “The View Beyond CRM: Reimagining Your Sales Process.”

The poll also revealed that more than 60% of respondents have not earned a positive ROI from their CRM systems. However, of the companies that have realized positive returns, those using technology as a means to reinforce and drive greater adoption of their sales process see greater impact.

Change is a fact of life for the modern enterprise. That includes change driven by the adoption of new technologies, such as marketing automation and CRM solutions, designed to revitalize sales and marketing organizations.

That's the promise of transformative technology. Yet the reality is often very different: According to some studies, more than one third of all major IT initiatives fail, and many others don't deliver their expected results.

Ryan Abreo, Vice President of Couch & Associates, is a seasoned veteran at helping enterprises navigate – and overcome – the challenges that derail transformative technology projects. As a preview of our upcoming webinar – The Sales & Marketing Transformation Triad: 3 Keys To Tying New Technology Rollouts To Business Results – Abreo sat down with DGR to answer some questions about this important topic.