By Chris Bucholtz

Two fairly unimportant facts about Marketo’s CEO, Phil Fernandez: one, in phone interviews, he sounds ever-so-vaguely like actor John C. Reilly, and two, he is fairly unafraid of using his sense of humor to get across his ideas, something that more chief executives ought to learn to do.

The latest example of this came last week, as Fernandez hollered, “viva la revolution!” during a call about Marketo’s new Lead Insight for Sales product, which is being touted as a contributor to a “Revenue Revolution,” as the company puts it. As opposed to your typical guerilla warfare-driven, government-toppling style of revolution, this revolution would call for a truce between sales and marketing and true cooperation.

This conflict, Fernandez said results in 70 percent of leads generated by marketing being wasted – and sales duplicating marketing’s efforts by hunting for leads on its own. “If the 20 to 40 percent of the time sales people do cold prospecting because they don’t trust marketing’s leads could be devoted to actually selling, we think it could release $1 trillion in revenue,” Fernandez asserted. Talk about your peace dividend.

Total number aside, it’s pretty clear that marketing and sales have a dysfunctional relationship in a lot of companies. Since they’re supposed to be working toward the same end, achieving the long-awaited goal of “sales and marketing alignment” would clearly unlock a lot of potential for revenue growth. What alignment looks like and how it can be achieved is a topic of some debate, but at least Marketo’s got some ideas that it’s putting to work in its products. (You can hear more about them in our “10 Questions” with Fernandez next week on Inside CRM.)

The company’s latest effort to get sales and marketing on the same page is the aforementioned Lead Insight for Sales, a tool currently in beta which works with its Lead Management product and is intended to help sales and marketing collaborate more closely to identify the best leads. The product will allow marketers to instantly push data on leads to sales when the leads do things that identify them as ready to buy – looking at demo videos on a website, for instance, or opening certain emails. The solution also allows sales to respond quickly – “send an e-mail inviting the lead to a webinar, send them a T-shirt, whatever,” Fernandez said.

Note the T-shirt thing – the Marketo solution is designed to incorporate things that happen in the real world, not just those that take place strictly on-line.

While the system is designed to automatically feed leads to sales, it also allows communications with leads to be personalized so they come from the sales representative, not some generic marketing bot. The solution’s also fully integrated with Mocrosoft Outlook and Salesforce.com.

The power in the solution, Fernandez says, is not just in the functionality. It’s in the way “good, solid, useful lead data can get past egos,” he said. “Sales will be a lot less resistant to what marketing’s doing, and marketing can get a more equal place at the table.” Sales can see a complete history of the lead with the company – the activities marketing launched that attracted him as well as the sales efforts made to convert him.

It’s a neat idea – and one that hopefully will catch the attention of CEOs who could help impose this “revolution” on their sales and marketing departments through the smart use of technology.