By Chris Bucholtz

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the sales/marketing misalignment that exists at most companies, and we keep hearing from readers that this seemingly never-ending issue saps efficiency from their companies in ways that endanger the success of both sides of the equation. Luckily, as sales efficiency grows in prominence, some companies are trying to address this – which is tough to do, since solutions either come from the sales side or the marketing side, and that creates a natural resistance from the other side.

Marketo’s trying to resolve that by speaking to sales through a language it understands. Yesterday, it formally announced Marketo Sales Insight, which CEO Phil Fernandez called a “social sales application.” The real power of this product starts with the fact that it’s a native Force.com application, meaning that Salesforce.com users (sales people) will have no trouble understanding it and adopting it – although it may not occur to them for a while that what it really does is allow marketing to present leads in a way that shows exactly how effective and important marketing is.

Oh, and it also ought to help sales focus their efforts on the right leads at the right time to help drive revenue and increase sales. That’s pretty important, too.

Here’s how Sales Insight does that: The system takes the data from the Marketo marketing automation solution, which tracks behaviors and interactions to determine how ready a contact may be to buy, and uses it to determine two factors: how hot the lead is (represented in the sales rep’s display as one to three “flames”) and how desirable the lead is as a customer (represented as one to three “stars.”) A sales rep can sit down in the morning and get a list of leads that is not just a list but a ranked grouping of companies he or she should focus on most intently that day – three flames and three stars? Call them first! - and that list will change as new data enters the system.

In fact, the application presents Facebook‐style “status updates” for the leads and contacts that a rep follows, highlighting the events that indicate buying interest. Again, those events are based on web analytics, email tracking and other things Market’s marketing automation system captures, records and correlates. The system’s also integrated with LinkedIn, DemandBase and Jigsaw in order to help identify anonymous traffic and add web visitors to your list of contacts.

The solution is pretty easy to use, too – I saw the demo, and if I could figure it out quickly, anyone could. There’s a reason for this – “it’s got to roll out with very little training,” said Fernandez. “Sales reps have very little appetite for learning a new application unless it’s really easy and it has an obvious immediate impact on how they work.”
Ideas like this are really useful in getting sales and marketing on the same page. The ideas here are not revolutionary (although the thinking about how to make good on them are very creative); the software replaces the overlooked part of the sales marketing cycle – the point where marketing turns their leads over to sales. Instead of chucking the list over the wall, Sales Insight allows that list to be updated, elaborated upon and evolve; if a sales rep can’t get to all the key leads on a list in a day, that doesn’t mean he’ll spend the next day hitting leads whose circumstances or attitudes have changed and are less worthy of his attention. Instead of a wall leads are thrown over, Marketo’s providing a constantly-evolving stream directly between sales and marketing, which is highly symbolic – and potentially highly lucrative to its customers.