You’ve heard of Ciena, a seller of communication network infrastructure, associated software, and professional services. They wanted to drive better performance and alignment across its sales and marketing organizations.

To make it work, sales and marketing relied on seven different systems to manage lead conversion, sales assets, customer data, forecasts and other activities. Marketing lacked the data to make informed decisions based on which campaigns generated the best leads and produced the greatest return. Not a great situation.

Plus the company needed to track all of its customer touch points to cultivate leads and plan efforts, and sales reps had difficulty finding relevant materials in a traditional document management system. Marketing and product management had no insight into which tools and content were used or deemed valuable by the field.

So Ciena wanted a single, easy-to-use platform that sales and marketing alike would embrace, and to that end deployed Salesforce CRM Sales and Marketing to 180 users to consolidate all global campaigns and deliver leads consistently to sales on one platform.

The company rolled out a Salesforce CRM content library in two months to nearly 400 users, with Salesforce CRM Marketing with Silverpop (News - Alert) Engage B2B from the AppExchange supports e-mail, direct mail, and telemarketing efforts.

The integrated Google AdWords lets Ciena manage and measure search engine campaigns from within Salesforce CRM, and further gladdening the hearts of Ciena officials, leads are automatically captured in Salesforce CRM, and a custom scoring tool keeps the best leads flowing. All touches are tracked to keep a history of a prospect’s overall experience.

It’s worked well. Ciena officials say they’ve launched more than 200 campaigns with Salesforce CRM, generating more than 20,000 leads and more than 700 opportunities – increasing pipeline 25 percent. And the lead scoring helps Ciena cultivate leads more effectively and focus efforts on high quality ones.