Optimizing the Marketing and Sales Process - Aberdeen Study

This document is the result of primary research performed by Aberdeen Group. Aberdeen Group's methodologies provide for objective fact-based research and represent
the best analysis available at the time of publication. Unless otherwise noted, the entire contents of this publication are copyrighted by Aberdeen Group, Inc. and may not
be reproduced, distributed, archived, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent by Aberdeen Group, Inc.
May 2013
Optimizing the Marketing and Sales Process:
How the Best-in-Class Take Faster, Better
Action to Convert More Leads
In its infancy, customer relationship management (CRM) technology was
originally designed as a uni-directional system of record: an efficient database
of demographic and firmographic information, populated by sales or customer
service reps every time they interacted with a known prospect or account.
What if, however, a modern CRM deployment could virtually think for itself,
supported by the marketing team, informing the selling organization when a
potential buyer took actions that revealed them as a “hot lead?” This
Research Brief explores a number of ways in which CRM, when enhanced
with marketing, sales, and social intelligence, can provide a more powerful
foundation for customer acquisition and engagement.
Why the Hidden Sales Cycle Matters
The traditional corporate lifecycle holds the marketing team accountable for
generating leads, which are then qualified as sales-ready, and finally turned
over to the sales “closers” for revenue generation. If this storyline was
representative of contemporary business-to-business (B2B) activities, then the
bottom two-thirds of Figure 1 would be simple enough to represent such a
Figure 1: The Hidden Sales Cycle Increases Pressure on Lead
Scoring
Source: Aberdeen Group, January 2013
Research Brief
Aberdeen’s Research Briefs
provide a detailed exploration of
key findings from a primary
research study, including key
performance indicators, Best-in-
Class insight, and vendor insight.

Optimizing the Marketing and Sales Process: How the Best-in-Class Take
Faster, Better Action to Convert More Leads
Page 2
© 2013 Aberdeen Group. Telephone: 617 854 5200
www.aberdeen.com Fax: 617 723 7897
one-way flow of customer and account data in the sales process. Indeed, the
traditional deployment of the CRM system described above would be sufficient in
this scenario: the marketing team could upload sales-ready leads into the CRM,
and walk away from any further involvement, assuming that sales would close all
of the opportunities worth closing, and launch new campaigns to add more leads
to the funnel.
In reality, selling to today’s highly educated business consumers mandates an
understanding of the buyer’s power: individuals and enterprises whom we identify
as potential customers have enormous resources in hand to evaluate our
products and services long before we identify them as a marketing opportunity or
qualified sales lead. This is what Aberdeen’s Marketing Effectiveness and Strategy
research refers to as “the hidden sales cycle” of the customer lifecycle: the pre-
sales window of activity when a prospect conducts their own research into our
products, solutions, and companies, often tapping into user-generated social media
content that allows them, not the selling organization, to determine whether they
become a potential buyer. Today’s savvy pre-customers don’t need to respond to
our outbound marketing efforts, nor our sales cold calls, in order to enter the top
third of the sales cycle represented in Figure 1. Indeed, the nature of the hidden
sales cycle contradicts the traditional assumption that the “waterfall” or
gravitational pull of the classic sales funnel guarantees that potential buyers will
inevitably make their way into the hands of enterprise sales closers.
Figure 2: CRM is More Effective When Marketing-Integrated
Source: Aberdeen Group, February 2012
Instead, contemporary marketing leaders need to find a way to maximize the
likelihood that when the pre-buyer’s inflection point occurs — something in their
business motivates them to indirectly search for a product or service — the
potential customer is somehow pre-positioned to locate positive and enticing
content that will motivate them to un-hide themselves and reveal, through their
70%
65%
53%
38%
46%
24%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
Heavy integration
of marketing lead
management with CRM
Ability to measure
close rate of marketing-
generated leads
in CRM
Percentindicating4/5on1-5scale
n = 163
Best-in-Class Industry Average Laggard
The Lead-to-Win Best-in-
Class
In January through March
2013, Aberdeen surveyed 165
end-user sales organizations
to understand how the top
performers among them use
bottom-of-funnel tools to
support sales effectiveness.
The performance metrics
used to define the Best-in-
Class (top 20%), Industry
Average (middle 50%), and
Laggard (bottom 30%) among
these sales teams are:
√ 91% team attainment of
sales quota, compared with
56% and 22% among
Industry Average and
Laggard firms.
√ 87% of sales reps achieving
annual quota, compared
with 48% and 20% among
Laggard firms.
√ 6.5% year-over-year
increase in team attainment
of sales quota, vs. 1.2% for
Industry Average
companies and an 8.8%
decline among Laggards.
improvement in (reduction
of) average sales cycle;
Laggard companies
reported a 1.2%
improvement and a 3.5%
worsening (lengthening),
respectively.

Page 3
behavior, the potential to enter the visible two-thirds of the sales cycle referenced
above.
This, of course, is the challenge for marketing today: how to create a brand and
enough positive, searchable content — and buzz — that will remove all possible
friction from the buyer’s journey through the customer engagement lifecycle. To
support these efforts, companies with the most successful sales results are more
aggressive in aligning the marketing and sales teams’ activities by integrating their
respective databases of prospects and customers. In Figure 2, we learn relevant
valuable lessons from Aberdeen’s research published in Breaking the Laws of
Physics: Shortening the Last Sales Mile Through Workflow Automation (April 2013):
that Best-in-Class enterprises (sidebar, page 2) are far more likely than under-
performing firms to closely align their marketing automation and CRM platforms.
The opportunities to recognize measurable business value from this kind of data
integration are many, and include: more accurate databases of prospects and
customers that are triangulated by quality control efforts in multiple systems; a
stronger ability for the marketing team to calculate their real value to the
company in terms of tracking how their pipeline development activities result in
closed business; and enhanced opportunities for the sales team to reject
potentially unqualified leads by turning them back over to marketing for re-
nurturing, rather than simply throwing them away.
Not a “Jumbo Shrimp” Oxymoron: Valuing Sales
Intelligence
With an aggressive integration of the marketing automation system and CRM
in place, solution providers can further augment their ability to effectively
close sales deals by actively streaming sales intelligence (sidebar) into the
CRM, as well. In Sales Intelligence: What B2B Sellers Need To Know Before the
Call (June 2012), Aberdeen research provides insight into how the most
effective sellers use both technology platforms and best practices to filter the
overwhelming amount of data available to them about their prospects,
Figure 3: Sales Intelligence Integration with CRM, by Best-in-Class
Source: Aberdeen Group, February 2012
53%
47%
30%
63%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
Sales intelligence
integrated into CRM
No CRM sales
intelligence
integration
PercentageofRespondents
n = 215
Best-in-Class All Others
Sales Intelligence Defined
For the purposes of this
research, the phrase “sales
intelligence” refers to any
information used to educate
and enable the sales force and
enrich the sales pipeline. This
includes news on industry
trends, consumer generated /
social content, list / database
providers, analyst reports,
prospecting tools, competitive /
market intelligence, and lead
augmentation solutions

Page 4
customers, and markets, cutting through the web-generated “noise” to isolate
which trigger events, news items, and even traditional lead lists are most
valuable in determining whom to call and how to spend their valuable time
selling, rather than manually researching sales prospects. As we see in Figure
3, the Best-in-Class companies from this data set (sidebar) are 77% more
likely than All Others (53% vs. 30%) to stream crucial sales intelligence
directly into their CRM platform. Sales teams are better equipped to meet or
beat quota when the CRM record of a contact or organization includes not
only internally generated information about a target, but relevant data about
the individuals, company, or market gleaned from external sources. For
example, a sales rep whose CRM instance is automatically populated with
breaking news about a merger or acquisition scenario, change in a key
account’s executive personnel, or new legislation that impacts their customer,
can more quickly triangulate the situation and take action, when compared to
a peer who only learns about such developments at the water cooler. A note
of interest regarding Figure 3: among Industry Average and Laggard firms, 7%
of survey respondents actually do not know whether their CRM is integrated
with sales intelligence data or not; all 100% of Best-in-Class companies were
in fact able to respond with a yes-or-no answer. This validates Aberdeen’s
long-standing findings indicating that the most successful businesses are,
somewhat obviously, better at understanding their own technology
deployments as well as the data that these solutions support.
Can a Tweet Result in a Sale?
In Social Selling: Unleashing the Power of Social Media on B2B Sales Enablement
(July 2012), Aberdeen research answered this chapter heading with a definitive
positive result: 57% of Best-in-Class companies (sidebar, page 5)
Figure 4: Social Selling Proves the Value of Richer CRM Data
Source: Aberdeen Group, March 2012
6.3%
3.3%
1.8%
1.3%
2.4%
-1.7%
-2.3%
-1.1%
-3%
-1%
1%
3%
5%
7%
Annual
revenue
Team
attainment
of quota
Reps
achieving
quota
Customer
renewal
rate
Year-over-yearchange
n = 182
Users of CRM integrated with social media All Others
The Sales Intelligence Best-in-
Class
In March and April 2012,
Aberdeen surveyed 215 end-
user sales organizations to
understand their sales
effectiveness best practices.
The performance metrics used
to define the Best- in-Class
(top 20%), Industry Average
(middle 50%), and Laggard
(bottom 30%) among these
sales teams are:
√ 88% customer retention
rate, vs. 78% among
Industry Average and 14%
for Laggard firms
√ 12.3% average year-over-
year increase in overall team
attainment of sales quota, vs.
a 1.0% increase for the
Industry Average and a 5.8%
decline among Laggard
respondents
year increase in the
percentage of sales reps
achieving quota, vs. a 1.2%
decline for Industry Average
and a 7.7% decline for
Laggard respondents of
(increase in) the cycle time
among Laggard respondents
year increase in average deal
size or contract value, vs. a
0.8% increase for the
Industry Average and a 1.5%
decline among Laggard
respondents

Page 5
reported having closed at least one sales deal that was originated or sourced
through social media; 36% of Industry Average and 24% of Laggard companies
indicated the same. In Figure 4, we further dissect these research results in
the context of CRM, discovering that companies populating the CRM with
relevant social media content out-perform non-adopters in a number of
significant sales effectiveness metrics on a year-over-year basis. The key word
in the previous sentence is “relevant” — the concept of “social CRM” is
ineffective if the virtual tidal wave of posts, tweets, blogs, and comments is
simply dumped into the prospect or customer record. Rather, the value of
social selling is best realized when companies only integrate into the CRM the
user-generated content that matters to their marketers and sellers.
Ideally, the technology solutions used to marry social media to prospect and
customer records can be configured at the management, administrative, and
individual contributor job role levels. For example, while a social media-savvy
B2B salesperson recognizes the value of following their contacts and accounts
on Twitter, the very act of reading all the user-generated content from their
territory could easily doom them to a “drinking from the fire hose” existence
that would effectively reduce their selling time due to the sheer volume of
tweets and posts. Alternatively, configuring their individual CRM account list
with the specific individuals and organizations whose content they actually see,
visually married to their CRM interface, provides a better opportunity to
understand only the relevant, real-time thoughts and needs of their prospects
and customers, without becoming overwhelmed by too much social media
content.
Triangulating Marketing, Sales, and Social Intelligence to
“Know Thy Customer”
We have now seen the value of integrating marketing automation, sales
intelligence, and social media content into the CRM platform, transforming it
from a static system of record into a dynamic system of customer
engagement. Much has been written about today’s consumer-driven economy,
focusing on how the balance of power has so dramatically shifted from the
seller of goods or services to the buyer, thanks to Internet-based content, and
user-generated information in particular (think back to when we were first
able to confront a car salesman with the faxed wholesale cost data from
Consumer Reports... that was only the start of the consumer revolution). In
the B2B space, the ability to create a more dynamic sales cycle offers
marketers and sellers a glimmer of hope in terms of swinging this power
pendulum back toward a place of parity. The process starts with the old, but
true axiom that “knowledge is power,” and is amplified by data uncovered by
Aberdeen in research conducted for the pending “Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit:
How Best-in-Class Companies Leverage a 360-Degree Customer View.” Here, the
strongest-performing firms demonstrate a consistently higher degree of
quality when it comes to accurately understanding the people, companies, and
markets they serve. Indeed, in Figure 5, we see a direct correlation between
the accuracy of prospect and customer data and Best-in-Class performance
(sidebar, page 6) throughout the entire lifecycle of customer engagement.
The Social Selling Best-in-Class
In April and May 2012, Aberdeen
surveyed 173 end-user sales
organizations to understand how
the top performers among them
use social media. The
performance metrics used to
define the Best-in-Class (top
20%), Industry Average (middle
50%) and Laggard (bottom 30%)
among these sales teams are:
√ 79% of sales reps achieved
quota in the last calendar or
fiscal year, compared with 43%
and 15% among Industry
Average and Laggard firms
√ 16.3% year-over-year increase
in total company revenue, vs.
4.1% for Industry Average
companies and an 8.7% decline
among Laggards
√ 8.9% year-over-year increase in
average deal size or contract
value; Industry Average and
Laggard companies reported
1.7% increase and a 6.6%
decline, respectively
√ The average sales cycle was
shorted by the Best-in-Class by
0.7%, and by Industry Average
firms by 0.2%; Laggards report
an average lengthening of the
sales cycle of 5.3%

Page 6
Figure 5: Quality of Account Data: Always Stronger by Best-in-
Class, Variable by Customer Lifecycle Stage
Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2011
At each step of the customer experience, the most successful companies
within this data set report far more accurate contact and organizational data
than under-performers. No marketer, seller, or customer service rep should
spend time figuring out which “version of the truth” regarding their account
specifics is the right one, taking time away from actually doing their job, but
the majority of Industry Average and Laggard companies actually burden their
customer-facing team members with exactly that inefficient situation. Of
course, Figure 5 also teaches us two sobering lessons: even for Best-in-Class
companies, account data never even reaches a three-quarters level of
accuracy; also, they, like all organizations on the whole, unfortunately retreat
from initiatives to keep customer records accurate once the initial marketing
and selling activity is complete. This may be a requisite though undesirable
reality of contemporary business development metaphors: in the hyper-
competitive world of sales, “you take what you can get”… or perhaps, “even
a blind squirrel finds the occasional nut.” In other words, while cleanliness is
next to godliness in terms of overall customer management, no one has the
time to be perfect.
Conclusion: Sales Context Nirvana May Be Within Reach
The intersection of CRM-integrated marketing, sales, and social media content
offers significant promise for companies seeking to more effectively acquire and
service B2B customers. Once we understand that a hidden sales cycle exists, we
are faced with both a challenge and an opportunity to impact how our potential
buyers learn about, and are potentially introduced to, our products and services.
Imagine the scenario such as this: an enterprise sales rep covering a large account
has faithfully kept their CRM record up-to-date with key influencers’ and decision-
makers’ basic demographic data, including relevant LinkedIn and Twitter handles.
50%
73%
63%
44%
33%
41%
38% 37%
23%
27%
42%
23%
0%
15%
30%
45%
60%
75%
Marketing stage:
lead generation
to contact
Sales stage:
contact to
contract
Fulfillment stage:
order to cash
Service stage:
customer retention,
up-sell and
cross-sell
AccuracyofCustomerData
n = 104
Best-in-Class Industry Average Laggard
The 360° Customer View
Best-in-Class
In June and July 2012, Aberdeen
surveyed 104 sales organizations
to understand their sales
effectiveness best practices. The
50%), and Laggard (bottom 30%)
among these sales teams were:
√ 94% customer retention rate,
vs. 81% among Industry
Average and 19% for Laggard
firms
√ 11.6% average year-over-year
increase in overall team
attainment of sales quota, vs. a
0.3% decrease for the Industry
Average and a 0.7% decrease
decrease in (improvement in)
the average sales cycle time, vs.
1.0% and 1.9% respective
increases in (worsening of)
sales cycles for Industry
Average and Laggard
respondents

Page 7
They have also taken the time to indicate in the CRM which geographic and
industry markets are important to their account, as well as which companies are
identified as the prime competitors of their target customer. Rather than
randomly call or email their contacts to try to sell them something, however, the
sales rep, supported by a rich CRM-based system of engagement, is empowered
with marketing, sales, and social media intelligence that constantly guides them
towards the most beneficial daily activities. For example:
• A senior-level contact in the target account downloads a content
marketing asset, as part of a marketing campaign around the new product
release. Because the marketing automation platform is fully integrated
with the CRM, the rep receives immediate notification that this executive
is displaying some flavor of pre-buying behavior. This doesn’t mean the
rep should call the executive within minutes – that would be too obvious
and somewhat creepy – but a follow-up call or request for the marketing
team to send a pre-positioned secondary message specifically tailored by
industry or geography can effectively triangulate the marketing efforts to
nurture the lead with eventual human sales activity. From the perspective
of the executive target, moreover, they may well be more receptive to a
more engaging conversation because of the topical context precipitated by
their own activity.
• The marketing team successfully registers 500 individuals for a webinar or
live product-oriented event. Should sales call all of them? Should sales call
only those who attend? This can easily result in the premature passing of
“leads” to sales; an all-too-familiar scenario teaches us that not everyone
who downloads, registers, or attends is truly a potential buyer. What if,
however, the sales team was enabled by an understanding of which
registrants, attendees, or any other relevant individuals were posting or
re-tweeting around the designated event Twitter hashtag? Again, this
brings us to the power of context: it is far more effective for a sales
organization to engage with a smaller number of more highly filtered
contacts — supported by triangulated marketing, sales, and social
intelligence — than to take the traditional, frustrating route of trying to
find the veritable needle in the marketing haystack.
Ultimately, sales effectiveness is best achieved when practitioners can call the best
leads, when empowered by the best information about their prospects and
customers. By understanding how the behavior of those target individuals and
companies self-defines which opportunities are real and actionable, Best-in-Class
companies are more efficient when it comes to uncovering value within a hidden
sales cycle, and then following up with a well-oiled machine to nurture and close
deals more often and more quickly. As a result, these top performers have a far
better capacity for understanding how to maintain and grow their customer base
and their business as a whole. Indeed, Aberdeen research conducted for Better
Sales Forecasting Through Process and Technology: No Crystal Ball Required (July 2012)
reveals how another set of Best-in-Class companies (sidebar) more effectively and
logically understands how to analyze and forecast all of this customer-oriented
data to better predict which deals will close, for how much, and when. As a result,
they are more able than under-performing firms to align the best opportunities
The Sales Forecasting / Analytics
Best-in-Class
In April and May 2012, Aberdeen
surveyed 1044 sales organizations
to understand their sales
forecasting best practices. The
50%), and Laggard (bottom 30%)
among these sales teams were:
√ 90% customer retention rate,
vs. 76% among Industry
Average and 41% for Laggard
firms
increase in overall team
attainment of sales quota, vs. a
1.3% increase for the Industry
Average and a 5.2% decline
improvement of (reduction in)
the average sales cycle, vs. 1.1%
for Industry Average firms and
a 4.7% worsening (increase)
among Laggard organizations

Page 8
with the most effective resources as each selling cycle draws to a close. Figure 6
captures the essence of effective customer management, showcasing how these
top performers are simply better at running their respective businesses. And, it
should be noted, 53% of these Best-in-Class enterprises fully integrate their sales
forecasting workflow into the CRM, fully 66% more often than Industry Average
and Laggard performers. In terms of growing the CRM from a system of record to
a system of engagement, this final piece of the customer-centric data integration
CRM puzzle falls neatly into place.
Figure 6: Better Insight into the Customer = Better Performance
Source: Aberdeen Group, May 2012
For more information on this or other research topics, please
visit www.aberdeen.com.
83%
78%
61% 61%
59%
52%
45%
35%
30%
45%
60%
75%
90%
Understanding
customers'
business
challenges
Demonstrating
industry / market
knowledge in the
sales process
Using forecasting
process
to add extra resources
to deals most likely
to close
Understanding which
opportunities are most /
least likely to close
Percentindicating4/5on1-5scale
n = 144
Best-in-Class All Others

Page 9
Related Research
Breaking the Laws of Physics: Shortening
the Last Sales Mile Through Workflow
Automation; April, 2013
CRM 2013: Generating Business Value
throughout the Enterprise; April 2013
Motivate, Incent, Compensate, Enable:
Sales Performance Management Best
Practices; January 2013
CRM 2013: Manufacturing Success
through Mobilized, Integrated, and Flexible
Deployments; January 2013
Collaborate, Listen, Contribute: How Best-
in-Class Sales Teams Leverage Social
Selling; November 2012
Train, Coach, Reinforce: Best Practices in
Maximizing Sales Productivity; October
2012
Better Sales Forecasting Through Process
and Technology: No Crystal Ball Required;
July 2012
Sales Intelligence: What B2B Sellers Need
To Know Before the Call; June 2012
Partner Relationship Management:
Channeling Better Sales Results; March
2012
Sales Mobility: How Best-in-Class Remote
Sellers Are Replacing “See” with “Do”;
March 2012
Author: Peter Ostrow, Vice President and Research Group Director; Customer
Management, Sales Effectiveness
(peter.ostrow@aberdeen.com) LinkedIn Twitter
For more than two decades, Aberdeen's research has been helping corporations worldwide become Best-in-Class.
Having benchmarked the performance of more than 644,000 companies, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to provide
organizations with the facts that matter — the facts that enable companies to get ahead and drive results. That's why our
research is relied on by more than 2.5 million readers in over 40 countries, 90% of the Fortune 1,000, and 93% of the
Technology 500.
As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen’s research provides insight and analysis to the Harte-Hanks community of local,
regional, national and international marketing executives. Combined, we help our customers leverage the power of
insight to deliver innovative multichannel marketing programs that drive business-changing results. For additional
information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 854-5200, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call
(800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com.
This document is the result of primary research performed by Aberdeen Group. Aberdeen Group's methodologies
provide for objective fact-based research and represent the best analysis available at the time of publication. Unless
otherwise noted, the entire contents of this publication are copyrighted by Aberdeen Group, Inc. and may not be
reproduced, distributed, archived, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent by Aberdeen
Group, Inc. (2013a)

Optimizing the Marketing and Sales Process - Aberdeen Study

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Optimizing the Marketing and Sales Process - Aberdeen Study