| | July 201619CIOReviewMarketing and Sales Alignment Delivers the Wow FactorBy Melissa Rothchild, VP of Marketing and Bryon Thelen-Perry, Senior Director of Sales, Thomson ReutersUntil recently, our business unit was saddled with an unconventional, manual lead assignment and tracking process that offered no visibility. Last month, we successfully rolled out a new fully automated lead scoring, lead assignment and marketing attribution workflow based on industry best practices. In addition to dozens of internal stakeholders, two consulting firms helped us at different stages of the project­Demand Gen and B2B Fusion Group. See below for a breakdown of our approach and the goals we had in mind throughout this 2-year collaborative initiative. · Get the Right Sales and Marketing Decision Makers around the Table Up Front­We started this project with a full-day session of our sales and marketing leaders deciding on how to define key terminology so that everyone would have the same definition of important terms like MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), SALs (Sales Accepted Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads). We also agreed up front on a few key SLAs (Service Level Agreement) for how quickly sales reps would need to follow up on new leads and how many attempts they could make at contacting a lead before sending it back to marketing to nurture or disqualifying it. These early sessions laid the foundation for a common understanding and common goals across the sales and marketing teams. Later in the project, we brought this cross-functional team together again to fine-tune and agree on a robust lead scoring model. · Focus on Productivity Enhancements­To make this new roll-out as effective and attractive to the sales team as possible, we kept the emphasis on areas where we could speed up and streamline the sales rep's workflow (less clicks, much more intuitive) for sales reps to receive, view and accept leads and convert those leads into opportunities in the CRM. This has also been very helpful from a sales training perspective, making it easier and faster for new reps to quickly pick up the process given it follows industry standard best practices vs. a customized workflow.The reps no longer have to spend time searching through long lists of campaign codes and manually attributing the valuesMelissa RothchildCXO Insights
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