By Lisa Cramer, Co-Founder & President, LeadLife Solutions

It's the age-old battle within any organization – Sales versus Marketing. Why is that? It seems both groups should be working hand-in-hand to create a seamless process for driving leads and revenue. The reality however is that most often, Marketing is motivated not by Sales, but by the number of leads (or suspects) it generates.

By Lisa Cramer, Co-Founder & President, LeadLife Solutions

It's the age-old battle within any organization – Sales versus Marketing. Why is that? It seems both groups should be working hand-in-hand to create a seamless process for driving leads and revenue. The reality however is that most often, Marketing is motivated not by Sales, but by the number of leads (or suspects) it generates.

As BtoB buyers demand a more engaging experience, sales and marketing executives  are being challenged to leverage new tactics to deliver a competitive advantage at every touch point. According to Gartner Research, companies lose 10% of sales due to lack of insight into their target market.

A recent webinar titled “Sales 2.0 Tactics for 2011: Accelerate Revenue & Improve ROI,” brought the need to master customer information to the forefront, and advised marketers to make the customer a bigger part of the value chain.

“There are still a lot of companies stuck in 1.0 mode, they’re still cold calling, using the traditional sales funnel (not a lifecycle funnel) and dialing phone numbers sequentially,” said Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder & CEO of Selling Power magazine.

By Audrey Spangenberg, CEO of FPX, Inc.

Using technology to streamline sales processes is not a new concept for businesses with complex sales. What’s become critical is the importance of capitalizing on accuracy, access and automation to shorten a lengthening sales cycle. According to Aberdeen Group research, under-performing companies see a year-over-year increase to their selling cycles of 12%. Moving every day sales tools to the cloud has proven benefits to results-driven companies under pressure to cut costs while being held to higher revenue performance.

By Audrey Spangenberg, CEO of FPX, Inc.

Using technology to streamline sales processes is not a new concept for businesses with complex sales. What’s become critical is the importance of capitalizing on accuracy, access and automation to shorten a lengthening sales cycle. According to Aberdeen Group research, under-performing companies see a year-over-year increase to their selling cycles of 12%. Moving every day sales tools to the cloud has proven benefits to results-driven companies under pressure to cut costs while being held to higher revenue performance.

The Pedowitz Group (TPG), announced its acquisition of social media and social CRM consulting firm Metz Consulting. Focused on providing its marketing clients with social revenue marketing services and expertise, social media expert and author Adam Metz joins TPG as the agency’s first Director of Social Business. Fellow Metz Consulting associate Christina Fan has also joined the company as Associate Revenue Engineer.

“We are extremely proud to join The Pedowitz Group team and look forward to providing our social revenue marketing strategy to TPG clients as part of their expert revenue marketing team,” Metz said in a press release.

Coming off a “breakout year,” SalesFUSION, the maker of SalesFUSION 360, an integrated sales and marketing demand generation platform, recently announced the company had signed 110 new clients and partners in 2010, bringing its customer count to just under 200 customers total.  

SalesFUSION’s customer acquisitions for 2010 included a diverse group of verticals, including healthcare, technology, business services, media, manufacturing and financial services. Customer acquisitions included enterprise level accounts such as Avanade, LexJet, Enpointe and Softchoice.

In an era where CTOs have become increasingly pressured to drive innovation to fuel growth for organizations, cloud computing has introduced a new wave of efficiency, empowering IT to allocate resources following a people-process approach to internal operations. DemandGen Report recently caught up with Mike Lingo, CTO & SVP, Professional Services, at Astadia, and author of Hey! You! Get Onto My Cloud, to explore how companies can effectively devise a “CloudMap” to streamline and support company growth efforts.

In an era where CTOs have become increasingly pressured to drive innovation to fuel growth for organizations, cloud computing has introduced a new wave of efficiency, empowering IT to allocate resources following a people-process approach to internal operations. DemandGen Report recently caught up with Mike Lingo, CTO & SVP, Professional Services, at Astadia, and author of Hey! You! Get Onto My Cloud, to explore how companies can effectively devise a “CloudMap” to streamline and support company growth efforts.

After many marketers underestimated the importance of data management in the early phases of rolling out marketing automation, data and reporting are expected to top the list of priorities in 2011. As demand generation practices continue to evolve and mature, industry analysts suggest people, processes and data will become top priorities.

“Even the best technologies available will fail to provide the needed insight if the data isn’t in order to support it,” points out Chris Parisi, VP of Technology at Bulldog Solutions. “There’s just no escaping the importance of clean, normalized, reliable data to drive success in online marketing. Data management is a necessity, and it shakes out in many ways. It’s critical not only for all of the revenue-driving activities marketers want and need to do, such as lead scoring, segmentation, lead nurturing — but also to reporting and business intelligence tools.”