Marketing departments are increasingly faced with managing complex inbound marketing campaigns, and owning more of the prospect relationship that traditionally belonged to Sales. At the same time, marketing and sales teams are being asked to demonstrate their direct impact on revenue generation to justify the value of marketing and sales expenditures. This is why it is critical to recognize that developing, executing and measuring marketing campaigns and programs don’t end simply with the creation of a lead. The quality of that lead delivered to the sales team will impact the propensity to close.

Having a lead management system in place that tracks performance and conversion along each step of the entire lead lifecycle is critical to ensure that the maximum amount of revenue is bring generated. Despite widespread adoption and integration of CRM systems, many marketing and sales teams continue to rely on internally-developed solutions or manual processes to manage marketing processes and their impact on revenue. Faced with increasing levels of complexity while lacking effective solutions to align marketing and sales teams around the goal of growing revenue, marketing teams will continue to struggle to efficiently collaborate across their constituencies, build effective content and marketing assets, track expenditures and measure return on investment and maintain brand and channel consistency.

Today, marketing’s increasing role is driven by producing and delivering on metrics that matter to the business as a whole – specifically revenue generation. To deliver on this, marketing and sales organizations will need to have systems in place to measure marketing and sales efforts.