Sales and marketing teams continue to compete over the same leads. A major step towards successfully implementing the available tools that can help improve sales is to tear down the wall that separates the two disciplines.

5 Key Ways to Measure (and Predict) Sales Force ProductivityMeeting aggressive sales goals requires more than just a dynamic sales team. It also requires you to do your homework in advance and gain an in-depth view of your company’s operational characteristics. This is where sales force productivity enters the revenue equation. You need salespeople who meet specific quotas and performance goals, reaching competitive preeminence, expanding market share and increasing sales.

How Business Dashboards Can Optimize Sales and Marketing PipelinesIn today's marketplace being organized is imperative to stay competitive. Managers want to be able to analyze sales metrics and track performance of existing campaigns without having to sort through mountains of paperwork and reports. Business dashboards can streamline data, and unlike "scorecard" type reports, can drill down to one sales process such as conversions for an email campaign in real time.

Business intelligence dashboards have been around since the eighties but the jury is still out as to whether these "intelligence" tools are effective at delivering better results. Over the past few years, enterprise managers have adopted marketing and sales dashboards as a way of measuring performance of their marketing and sales teams. Most popular preconfigured models provide a screen full of graphs, tables, and other visual aids which depict real-time outputs. However, out-of-the-box products don't often provide data in a manner that optimizes performance.

Though interrelated, marketing and sales are two different disciplines and areas of the business process. The simplified version: the marketing team pre-qualifies, so the sales team can follow real leads. Together, they streamline the buying and selling process.

Some businesses only use their CRM system for the most basic functions such as a customer database. This management system is customizable and to obtain its full benefits, think of CRM as the most effective marketing and sales hub your business has.

Do you surprise the prospect based on their behavior? Or, do you ask for permission to move them into sales? Or, maybe you have a "good relationship" already so it isn't really a surprise?

We spend a lot of our time working very hard to get sales and marketing teams to work together. And this involves questions like the following. What is an effective way in which marketing teams can refer leads to sales teams? What do sales teams do with the leads handed to them from marketing? What happens if the leads are not fully qualified, or if, after qualification, it is deemed that the client is not ready for a company’s services but soon will be?