Should Demand Generation and Sales Automation Be Separate Systems?

I’ve been focusing (obsessing?) recently on the idea that the boundaries between marketing and sales are breaking down because leads now interact with both departments throughout the purchase cycle. This is clearly inevitable: if nothing else, leads still visit your Web site (controlled by marketing) even after they are “turned over” to sales. More fundamentally, the very idea of a lead being “turned over” is now obsolete: today the buyers are in control; neither department ever owns them in the first place.

The sheer volume of interactions also means that sales can’t cost-effectively handle every contact, even for the highest-priority individuals. Rather, salespeople must focus on what only they can do – provide nuanced, personal service – and delegate other tasks to resources that can handle them more cheaply and often more quickly. In many cases, those resources will be automated systems that are run by marketing. (Yes, sales could duplicate those systems for itself. But buyers would still sometimes enter through marketing-run channels, so marketing and sales would still need to coordinate. Remember, the buyer is in control.)

The immediate implication of this is that marketing and sales must work together to ensure that every lead is treated appropriately in both marketing and sales systems. Today, this is accomplished by synchronizing data between demand generation and sales automation systems. But that is inherently complex. The obvious (or perhaps simple-minded) solution is to skip the synchronization and have marketing and sales work on one shared system.

This isn’t a new idea: indeed, “marketing, sales and service” have long been the three components of Customer Relationship Management products. But marketing was always the weakest link, and, typically, was pretty much separate when you looked under the hood. There was a sound technical reason for this: sales and service are operational systems with a transactional data architecture, while marketing databases are structured for analysis. But this distinction is less important given the power of modern databases, particularly at the relatively low volumes of most business-to-business marketers.

In fact, the division between demand generation and sales automation today is probably more a reflection of organizational divisions than technical imperatives. But as the two departments become more intertwined, this will increasingly be an anachronism that presents an obstacle to success.

So are independent demand generation systems doomed to be assimilated into larger CRM products? If so, the obvious but unspoken threat looming over the industry (“the elephant in the room of Damocles”) was always Salesforce.com, which is the main data source for most demand generation products. That particular, um, shoe may have dropped, according to a BNET article yesterday from Michael Hickins (Marketing Automation Next For Salesforce.com)

Whether Salesforce.com would really do this, how quickly they would move, and whether they would build or buy are all intriguing questions. But regardless of what Salesforce.com does in the short term, it's worth asking whether independent demand generation systems really have a long-term future.