Customers see over a million marketing and sales messages a year almost two messages every minute. Yet, over 70 percent of sales leads generated through these initiatives are never followed up.

Those are frightening statistics. That means that the 10 percent to 30 percent of the budget youre spending on marketing isnt working nearly as hard as it could or should.

Based on FrontRanges 14 years of industry experience, Im willing to bet that the answer lies in a lack of integration between marketing and sales:

• Do they share information about prospects and existing customers?
• Is their respective information ever put together in a coherent form so that both departments can immediately see what the status is of a prospect or customer and adjust their approach accordingly, in order to increase the possibility of closing a sale?
• Is every customer touch recorded, so that both departments can see the way your employees are meeting customer demands?

My guess is that the answer to most of those questions is: No. Not because your sales and marketing people dont work incredibly hard. Or because no-one in your organization has thought of any of these processes and procedures and tried to implement them in one form or another.

Theres such a huge, rapid flow of information in sales and marketing departments that capturing and tracking it manually is virtually impossible even if the age-old antagonism between such departments werent an inhibiting factor at the start. And, manually sorting the information into coherent pictures of customers and the market is too time-consuming and subject to individual interpretation to be worth pursuing. Its just that theres no easy way to implement them without CRM technology.

But CRM doesnt just apply customer relationship data. Sales staffers have to spend a significant portion of their time on sales force management functions, such as filling out and waiting for reports time that could be otherwise spent meeting customer needs. The automation and integration capabilities built into SFA technology not only allow sales people to make better use of their time, but also give them the ability to convert their sales data into a valuable marketing resource.

Focus talent where its needed most
By improving the efficiency of the sales process with SFA technology, your sales team can improve their ratio of selling time to non-selling time. Rather than spending time writing out sales and activity reports, your sales team can fill in prepared e-forms and submit them electronically. And sales people can access inventory data and prospect lists in real time instead of having to wait for hard copies. This allows your sales team to better focus their attention where it matters most the customer.

SFA technology also speeds up management response time by allowing sales staff to send data faster and more frequently. By receiving up-to-date information, management can be confident its decisions reflect current data. With up-to-date data, managers can provide more timely market research and better track the productivity of their sales force. Managers can also target both profitable and problematic customers giving the sales staff the ability to better serve these customers before its too late.

Prioritizing leads and forecasted sales allows both the reps and mangers to focus on the high priority items more completely and reports not only allow you to track activity against a campaign, for example, but also allow you to identify leads that havent been followed up a hidden secret in maximizing the potential.

In addition, workflow attributes for assigning follow up activities to other team members increases efficiency; scheduling up literature fulfillment and document creation allows faster response to prospect inquiries and setting follow up actions with prospects cuts time out of the sales process and builds mutual commitment a great indicator in qualifying prospects.

Make the right connections
SFA technology has the ability to analyze information and present it in a user friendly way. Then activity reports, orders booked and other sales information can not only be easily reviewed and understood by the sales force manager, but by your marketing department as well.

With more of their regular functions automated, your sales team can get the general information they need and can focus on the customer. Using SFA as part of an effective CRM program can provide both marketing and sales with the full picture they need from general trends to specific prospect leads. Shared information means that sales and marketing can both work on refining approaches and campaign messages to individual prospects and the market generally, ensuring that your organizations messages are heard above the marketing din. This makes it possible to connect, at every relevant level, leads generated by marketing to the resulting revenue by sales.

Beyond sales
CRM technology also creates strategic business benefits beyond short-term marketing-to-revenue links. It makes you a proactive, rather than a reactive, business.

A recent survey of sales execs found that firms with CRM for their sales team had 65% more meetings and a 16% higher close ration in part because of the focus and access to information. These are impressive results and some proof that CRM automation is having an impact on sales revenue.

When sales managers receive data from their sales team through SFA functions they can make immediate decisions about current prospects and customers. They can also better coordinate with the promotional mix by sending this information to the marketing department. The ability to have valuable customer sales and preference data immediately allows both the sales and marketing team to analyze current customer preferences and better predict the market potential of existing and future products.

By using a CRM system that is best-practice- and rules-based, you know your sales and marketing staff will always be doing the right thing at the right time and wont have to continually reinvent the wheel. Youll be able to let them unleash their creativity and self-motivation without being at the whim of their potentially inhibiting personal idiosyncrasies.

Its hard to see, actually how you can lose by using CRM and SFA technology.

Paul Petersen is the Senior Director, CRM Business Unit for FrontRange Solutions, the maker of GoldMine software, one of the leading software titles for business productivity for more than 10 years. In his 30 years in IT management, development, sales and marketing, Petersen has built, bought and sold solutions for major companies, including McDonalds Corporation, General Electric, Arthur Young, Delrina, and Symantec. He also holds the Professional Certified Marketer designation from the American Marketing Association.