I spoke at the Eloqua Marketing Effectiveness Summit last week up in Dallas (http://summit.eloqua.com/) – strangely enough as I write this I am back in Dallas on a trip to the east coast and my flight is cancelled (another blog, another story) and since I am here for 3 unplanned hours, how better to spend my time then to blog!

As the session started and the discussion leaders engaged the attendees (lead generation folks from companies like National Instruments, Vignette, FuelQuest, Paymetrics, etc.), I felt like the session was going to be a support group with 2 major glaring issues:

1. Sales and Marketing Relationship/Rules of engagement
2. Data Issues – New data (lists. Leads) sourcing, working with internal data (house lists, customer data, support data, cross selling, up selling).

On number 1 above I believe (and did pontificate at the session) that marketing and sales have to co-exist in harmony or the business loses. I also recommend a formal legally binding (not really) contract between marking and sales on the definition of a lead. As one marketer said, working with sales or empowering them with information to market to their customer base was “like giving the devil a soul” – lady calm down, maybe you need to talk this one through. Hey Psychiatrists out there, there is a new form of couples therapy needed on the planet – B2B marketing and sales.

In terms of data issues, I have been frustrated for the last 10 years on the poor quality of lists and also the lack of analytics available to marketers (and hence we launched ReachForce) but did not realize the gravity of the problems/issues and ongoing struggles. Some interesting points of note were:

• We are all stuck in a B2C world of thinking and need to think about B2B marketing differently – it is different and more complicated from a sales process perspective
• Internal company data is suspect at best – how do you define rules of engagement between sales and marketing on when or when not to touch a prospect / customer
• How do you keep internal data (in the CRM system) refreshed/updated as it’s touched by different people at different stages of a sales (and post sales cycle) – who is the MASTER owner of the data and defines the different roles of people by stage of marketing sales/cycle
• Data visibility – how do you think about direct visibility of service and support data (the instance was a support ticket) associated with a customer as a flag to marketing and sales before that person/company is touched/messaged next
• And on and on … enough that I think we will start B2B Marketing support group in Austin as a start in 2008!