As much as an organization's sales and marketing teams want to work together to achieve the shared goal of getting and keeping customers, they sometimes can't agree on how to make that happen. For Intellitactics, this complication eased when the company implemented a lead management program.

In 2007 the security management software company began using resellers and partners to augment its direct-sales business. According to Pam Casale, chief marketing officer, it was the perfect time to rethink the sales cycle and marketing's role within it.

 "We had to get smarter about how we do lead generation," Casale says. "We wanted to nurture suspects and prospects earlier in the sales cycle." Working with Manticore Technology, Intellitactics implemented a formal lead management program, which includes scoring and nurturing tools. Casale says that now sales can define qualified leads by assigning scores to different customer activities, such as visiting the website, downloading a white paper, or talking to a sales rep. "Lead scoring gave us a way to let sales determine what an activity would be worth. It has turned the subjective into objective," she says.

 In addition, Casale says that now she can look at the success of certain marketing campaigns to help predict future actions and make changes quickly when something doesn't work. For example, previously the company waited until the end of the sales cycle to show potential clients a product demo. But by tracking and scoring lead behavior, Casale and her team realized that valuable leads wanted to see the product earlier. Now that businesses are required to comply with new regulations and security standards, prospects are looking for guidance earlier in the sales cycle. "We needed to create multiple ways to help a lead create a vision," Casale says.

 With the data to back up the theory, she convinced the sales organization that it was worthwhile to invest time and resources into training and demonstrations earlier in the sales cycle. Now a sales engineer hosts a live demo every Tuesday for prospects, and the company has produced a training video that is posted on third-party sites. "The program had a big impact on the number of people we were able to qualify early," Casale says. "Before, we didn't allocate resources for multimedia."

 Other results of the lead management program include a shortened sales cycle, because the process of creating campaigns and feeding content to prospects is much faster. Casale says the number of qualified leads has increased, and so has the number of leads converting to customers, though she does not provide specific numbers.

 The biggest impact is that the relationship between sales and marketing has improved, Casale says. "The tools give the sales organization more confidence in the quality of the leads," because they have a role in defining them," she says. "We had a good relationship with sales before, but now it's better. Removing conflict with sales was an unexpected but wonderful outcome. It's no longer a conversation about personalities. Now it's about actual prospect behavior and results."