I attended the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, and one of keynotes was given by Stu Schmidt, Vice President of Solution Sales at Cisco Webex.  Among many interesting things he imparted in his presentation on sales process and measurement, was this:

A 10% improvement in lead quality can result in a 40% improvement in sales productivity.

While Stu was talking about improving the sales process to qualify leads earlier, I found this to be an interesting statistic for marketers, as well.  As a marketer, I spent the past couple of years (at another company), attempting to nurture leads until they were sales-ready. That is, I tried to build a process that allowed me to communicate with prospects, build relationships with them, and track their interest in my product line.

Because of the lack of affordable, easy-to-use marketing automation, this nurturing process was time-consuming and nearly impossible to maintain. And tracking and scoring has always been a manual and sometimes subjective process. 

But marketing automation, in the form of lead management, is on the way, available in a dynamic, easy-to-use, on-demand solution from Marketo. With Marketo Lead Management, I can build nurturing campaigns using a drag and drop interface. I can score leads according to the interest my prospect has shown via white paper downloads and website visits. And I can automatically push sales-ready leads to salesforce.com and task the appropriate sales rep to call the prospect.

Marketo can help you increase lead quality and thereby increase sales productivity. Learn more about Marketo Lead Management now.