In globalizing markets, businesses can no longer survive and thrive as siloed organizations, where marketing stands apart from sales. The two must work hand-in-hand, with marketing virtually obsessing about learning everything possible about customers, then—and this is the key point—leveraging that data by passing it on to sales in a smooth, consistent and real-time way.
This is the Age of the Customer. Customers are exposed to marketing constantly, in multiple formats and on multiple devices. It’s critical that a marketing organization have access to the skills and tools to rise above the noise, understand customers intimately, and pass on that understanding to sales in the form of targeted marketing. It’s also the age of one-on-one marketing and constantly changing sales cycles. Marketing campaigns have to be right-on-target, right-on-time and dedicated to passing on highly qualified leads to sales.
That means becoming immersed in Inbound Marketing as much as Outbound Marketing: where marketers are bringing customers to you through the whole ecosystem of digital communications, The Web, Mobile, Social Media or truly anything Internet enabled. It also means having access to the tools to put today’s Relevant Marketing into place. That translates to Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP), the collective name for the class of digital tools that allow you to connect with customers and collect relevant, actionable customer data from a myriad of touch points and pass it on in an usable format to your sales force. But it also requires a guide through the whole digital ecosystem—someone who knows how to navigate the territory—to help you get the information to your sales team before your competition sprints to the finish line ahead of you.
If you fail to transform your organization into one dedicated to Relevant Marketing, you are apt to leave your sales team Starving in the Wilderness.