The "Good" – driving more true sales opportunities out of your demand generation program by partnering with Sales
I just rejoined a software company after a 2 year stint elsewhere. As such, nearly all of the sales execs are new. As I started to re-establish the demand gen engine at the company I made sure to spend lots of time with the Sales team to mutually identify the targets, outline the lead process/flow and create detailed lead definitions. We’ve only just gotten started but already I can notice a huge difference in the effectiveness of the joint teams over prior regimes that remained in separate ivory towers.
It really is quite simple but so often we get too busy/lazy to communicate what we are doing, or are hindered by disparate locations, but we must make the effort to engage Sales upfront and on a weekly (if not daily) basis. Kirk Crenshaw at DemandBlog wrote a great post that summarizes some simple steps that will get you started.