A marketing forum conducted recently (May 2010) by the technology and marketing research company Forrester Research (http://tinyurl.com/35o6wq4) provided useful insight into how B-to-B leads bind together the different operational cycles of sales and marketing. 

The forum discussed how sales and marketing functions in an organisation would generate returns over the period of a year. B-to-B sales targeting was defined as the key to return on sales, finding ways to drive more targeted, focused conversations with customers that would lead to shorter-cycle, larger deals. But it was argued that marketing could actually scale faster than sales, since it implemented adaptive approaches to integrating engagement across channels, including social media.

These two separate roles for sales and marketing were said to have a common bond in providing B-to-B lead management - but there was uncertainty on how these two roles were actually separated in practice. Forrester Research differentiated the two by describing the sales role as being responsible for revenue attainment. In most companies, that equates to a "now," "this quarter" and, sometimes, "yesterday" cycle. Marketing, however, was described as being responsible for profitable revenue growth - equating to a "pipeline," "next quarter" and (too often) "whenever" cycle in most companies

In order for marketing's and sales' efforts to better administer lead management, the distinctions between marketing customers and sales customers were also outlined:   

• A marketing customer was defined as one in the process of being developed as a lead. Marketing uses engagement mechanisms to nurture customers, providing concrete value in return for additional customer data, opportunity insights and commitments to enter into deeper types of engagements.
• A sales customer, by contrast, has declared a need and is ready for a revenue discussion. Sales uses selling resources and techniques to do whatever they need to do to secure deals.

In this context, Prospectvision plays a pivotal role - ensuring potential customers are identified thus enabling the marketing function to take over.

The Forrester forum concluded with some recommendations to ensure a clean and workable split between the sales and marketing functions. Effectively, marketing needed to:

• Ensure that every marketing interaction can be regarded as a source of value by marketing customers.
• Implement real systems for evaluating likely returns on engagements throughout the nurturing process.
• Stop throwing leads ‘over the wall' at sales, then complaining that sales hadn't closed the loop on worthless interactions.

The most important recommendation, however, to ensure successful sales and marketing harmony with regards lead management was to ensure that both functions  stay focused on customers, and not just processes.