New Coke. Google Phone. Edsel. The annals of business are littered with examples of product flops introduced by otherwise very savvy enterprises but whose resounding failures might arguably be attributed to the chasm between the organization’s sales team and its marketers.

Sure, there was also a disconnect between the companies and their customers, but that just goes to the heart of the problem.

Now, more than ever, your customers and their interactions with your brand are tightly integrated. And so too, your marketing and sales teams must be better aligned than they’ve ever been. Studies show that companies with aligned sales and marketing team increase their revenues by an average of 47 percent compared to those who do not bring these two organizations together.

Consider these steps you can take to close the gap between the yin and yang of your revenue-generating machine:

1. Agree on the goals: Often, one of the weakest links in getting sales aligned to marketing (and vice versa) is agreeing on the goals. Yes, the objective is to drive revenues, but how you get there, which needles, so to speak, are key to getting that done should be one of the first topics for discussion between the sales and marketing organizations.

Is the goal to get more leads (we’ll talk about leads in a moment)? Do you want more subscribers to your blog or newsletter, more names in the email database? Are you trying to cross-sell or upsell to existing customers? Is there a Facebook page where you’re trying to increase engagement?

You will never achieve alignment between sales and marketing if you cannot agree from the outset what the goals are, what targets you need to hit to meet those goals, how long you have to hit those targets, and who is responsible for achieving each of the actions that will get you to those goals.

2. Agree on the starting point: The more specifically sales and marketing can agree on the staring point—whether that’s leads currently in the sales funnel, the number of downloads for a whitepaper or ebook, or even sales to date, the sooner the two will come together in alignment. Reaching agreement on the starting point makes the evaluations you make later that much easier to clearly assess.

3. Implement integrated tools: Sales and marketing will never come together over their progress (let alone a celebratory dinner at the end of the quarter) if the tools the two teams are using are themselves out of alignment.

Marketing’s ability to see what sales sees regarding a customer’s sales history are critical to its success. Likewise, unless sales knows what marketing knows about the Web pages they’ve visited, marketing collateral they’ve downloaded, topics they have shared with friends, family, or colleagues via social media or other means, they cannot understand the customer fully.

The solution—and really, the hub that aligns sales and marketing—is an all-in-one inbound marketing application that connects your marketing initiatives (and all its metrics and analytics) with your customer relationship management (CRM) application (and its customer histories).

Combined, these applications give both teams a 360-degree view of customers and prospects from the moment they engage with your brand and then throughout their lifecycle.

4. Measurement and analysis: Once sales and marketing agree on the appropriate metrics, the two must come together to review those metrics, determine what they mean in terms of the established goals, and decide on next steps.

A proper inbound marketing application connected to a CRM application gives sales and marketing the numbers they need to move the needles in the right direction.

If, for example, one of the goals was to increase subscribers to a blog or newsletter by 10 percent, how did that fare during the latest accounting period? You might want to see how that increase in subscribers affected social sharing and in turn, how that impacted revenues.

Or, you might want to compare the difference between the sales close rate on prospects who downloaded a whitepaper or ebook to those who did not; or, compare the average sale for people who share your brand with others in their social network. These same tools—inbound marketing applications and CRM applications—are the ones you’ll use to find your best customers, those who spend the most and those who evangelize your brand the most—if your systems and teams are properly aligned.

5. Agree on what a qualified lead is: One of the most common complaints salespeople have about marketers is the quality of the leads they’re given.

And, to be fair, in many instances, the complaints are justified. Just because someone visited your website and looked at a page or two doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ready to buy or even ready to be contacted by the sales team.

When sales and marketing work together to find the optimal time to pass along leads, the result is certain to improve the bottom line while reducing friction between the two business units.

The information to do this will come only when the metrics and analytics from the inbound marketing application and CRM tool are connected. Then, you see which leads resulted in sales and when, which actions preceded the sale, and what actions followed the sale and might prompt additional marketing or sales contacts.

6. Put a SLA in place: A service level agreement (SLA) is one of the most effective tools any organization can have to help meets its objectives. While historically, SLAs began as the contract binding an enterprise to its customers and set the level of expectations for both, these agreements also go a long way toward improving the alignment between internal organizations, such as sales and marketing.

Using your definition of what a qualified (or “workable”) lead is and comparing that to the actions sales takes and its success, you will be able to monitor the effectiveness of the sales level agreement as you have defined it.

7. Open the lines of communication—and keep them open: All the technology in the world will not align sales and marketing if the two teams don’t come together to talk and realize they are literally opposite sides of the coin—the revenue coin.

Each enterprise will have to work out for themselves how best to affect this interaction, but the stakes are too high, the consequences too severe, to let anything stand in the way.

Depending on your enterprise, you might try weekly or monthly meetings, you might create a LinkedIn group or an internal wiki to share ideas, successes, and challenges between sales and marketing. You might host a webinar or an offsite to familiarize each team with what happens in the other’s turf. Show sales what your inbound marketing dashboard looks like and how it works while they explain how they use the CRM to close deals.

Align Your Teams

Aligning sales and marketing should come naturally, but all too often it does not.

Whether it’s competition, jealousy, misunderstanding, or something else really is irrelevant. It was Benjamin Franklin who famously said, “If we do not hang together, we shall surely all hang separately.”

The same is true when it comes to your revenue-generating team. Get them in alignment and the Benjamins--those $100 bills every enterprise is chasing—will follow.

In 2011, Raab Associates Inc reported that the B2B marketing automation industry would reach $325 million at the end of 2011, which was a 50% increase from 2010 (2010 also doubled in revenue from 2009).

Forrester’s B2B Marketing Trends report from Feb, 2012 stated that 19% of B2B organizations are planning to implement marketing automation in 2012 while another 17t% plan to expand their usage.

Why is Marketing automation important even though it isn’t sexy? If you’re looking to move prospective leads into qualified leads, marketing automation should be playing a significant role. Marketing automation at its core, should be set up to send relevant messages to existing leads that are triggered by some type of action. For instance, if an existing lead were to view a page about marketing analytics, that could trigger a personalized email from your marketing analytics expert offering a free eBook on marketing analytics as well as offer to answer any questions.

Gartner Research projects that “by 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationships without talking to a human.”

With lead interaction becoming less and less personal at scale and more CRM/automation focused, the goal of a marketing automation campaign should be to try and provide the most relevant, targeted and insightful data to each lead as possible, such as the preceding marketing analytics example. Prospective leads aren’t opposed to automation as long as what they are receiving is relevant to them, concise and helps show how you can help solve the specific problem that they have. Identify the pain point, and show how you can help.

Below are a few things to keep in mind in regard to Marketing Automation:

Customer Serving – Relevancy is essential to customer happiness and success. If you see that a lead has an interest in SEO, don’t send content about anything else except SEO. Make the connection and show that you can solve each specific problem that arises, but don’t overwhelm leads by just pushing them into a demo.

Pressure Free – Gleanster reports that 50% of qualified leads are not ready to purchase immediately. An effective way to continue to move prospective leads through the funnel and closer to a sale is to provide them with relevant content. Relevant content shows thought leadership, expertise and an interest in helping to educate leads on a problem that they have, not just push them a generic demo or free trial offer.

Customer support – Just because a sale has closed, that doesn’t mean marketing automation ends. Customer happiness and success will help reduce customer and revenue churn so continuing to provide relevant content, updates and events that pertain to customer goals will help improve long term customer retention rates.

The reason marketing automation isn’t sexy is because it takes time to set up and manage. Post launch, the “automation” element will take over, however the set up process (when done correctly) can certainly be time consuming. Investing the time and efforts though will enhance your sales process. Keep in mind that your marketing automation efforts act as a potential customer’s FIRST view into your company. If you’re automation efforts are lagging or even non-existent, what type of a message are you sending about your company?

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of Marketing Automation software for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

I often hear a skeptical tone from clients and colleagues when discussing running a promoted accounts campaign within Twitter. “Twitter for lead gen? People don’t read even other Tweets.” Additional questions I hear are usually about paying for followers when you could be generating them for “free.”

What I always tell people is to keep in mind that promoted campaigns are run on a cost-per-click basis, so you’ll only be paying for clicks in which people expressed an interest in your offer. And while you can certainly generate followers organically, putting some media dollars towards Twitter can help rocketship your growing number of followers very quickly.

Additionally, when thinking about running a promoted accounts campaign, consider the ROI. If you could run a campaign that produced a 2:1 return or a 3:1 return, would you do it? Odds are you would, so take the time to thoroughly explore your company’s potential within Twitter promoted accounts to decide if there’s an opportunity for you or not.

Here are five easy steps to running a promoted accounts campaign on Twitter:

1. Acquire a base of followers. Set aside a test budget, confirm a cost per follow goal as well as a total number of followers goal, and do not stop until you hit that number. Specify geo-targeting and interests to ensure your campaign is as tightly targeted as can be. Think about this as building the exact audience you want to interact with and reach.

2. Now that you’ve acquired them, interact with your followers. Remember when people used to talk to each other? The same principles apply here; it’s not that hard. Tweet out to them, give props when you see them offering value, and then when you are ready to start offering value to them Tweet it out. Offering free eBooks is a good example of a value offering.

3. Through your promoted account ads, drive users to a landing page that briefly outlines your promotion. If you offered an eBook, for example, gate it with a form to collect user data and then offer the eBook on the thank you page. Make sure your landing page is either unique or has proper tracking appended so that you can positively track all of the users that came in from your Twitter campaign and identify a cost per lead.

4. Follow through and follow up. Continuing with an eBook example, make sure to thank your users for downloading your content, then have your sales/acquisition team reach out in the near future to gauge additional levels of interest.

5. Rinse, repeat, and scale! Once your initial test is done, go back and identify key performance indicators (KPIs). On average, figure out what can you generate a new follower for and at what cost? What percent of followers (existing and new) will respond to a lead- generation offer and click through to a landing page? What percent of users will convert on that landing page? 

Before you start any of these steps, make sure understand what your cost-per-lead goal is. This will help you shape the rest of your campaign. Odds are, your initial cost per lead goal will be slightly off. That’s fine. Once you’ve exhausted your test budget, review your data, recalibrate where needed, then scale. Figure out how many leads you’re going to get per hundred or thousand followers, confirm the cost that went into acquiring that block of followers, then use your cost-per-lead averages to back into a target cost-per-follow goal.

Also make sure your social media team is well versed in paid media. Running paid social media campaigns requires a hybrid of skills across both paid and social, and the best campaigns are the ones that fuse the two together.

Running a Twitter paid media program is a multi-step process and isn’t something to test unless you’re willing to commit time, resources, and effort. If you do dedicate the time though, you’ll find that Twitter can be an effective channel for lead generation.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software rankings.