Salesforce.com Punch-List for Marketing VPs After Rollout

Your company's CRM system is turned on. Leads are flowing out to the sales team. Now what? Where do marketers need to spend time in the system? What decisions will the marketing team have to make? How should you measure success?

Here are some marketing executive guidelines for the first few months of system usage. While much of this article applies to any modern CRM system, we've focused here on the specifics of Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com: What Sales VPs Need to Know After Rollout

[ Did you miss last week's CIO.com article exploring what sales VPs need to know to make a new Salesforce.com or CRM rollout succeed for the business? Check it out here. ]

1. Focus on Lead Quality, not Quantity
The knee-jerk reaction is to measure marketing based on lead flow. Unfortunately, lead quantity by itself is almost meaningless and is easily gamed ("I just bought 10,000,000 leads on this US$14.95 CD-ROM!"). As you'll see below, it's more meaningful to produce a few very high quality leads, delivering them to reps in a way that reduces information overload and improves call-back time.

If you want to go even further, don't focus on leads at all. Most leads are ignored anyway. Instead, optimize the marketing and lead cultivation process to produce sales cycles. This means producing fully qualified, converted leads: people who are interested in taking a sales call. In SFDC terms, this means the sales reps should be seeing only opportunities and contacts, not leads or campaigns. While producing "sales appointments" can not be the sole responsibility of marketing, working closely with your telesales (or sales development) reps can have a big impact on business results.

2. Get the Cultivation Process Right
Before you can really make headway, you need to make sure that both sales and marketing are working with a coherent model. The model needs to describe the life of a lead: how they evolve, who handles them at each stage, and the major sales-marketing interactions that happen on the way to closing the deal.

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