“At this point, you can start to plan increasingly granular interactions,” said Charles Watson, VP-marketing and products at Blueroads Corp., which specializes in managing sales channel leads.

To effectively revive seemingly lost deals, Watson recommends ongoing “drip-feed” communications involving a steady (but not intrusive) stream of newsletters, e-mails, press releases and high-level white papers.

“You don’t want to go radio-silent here because at some point, maybe in two years, that lead will want to review its purchase decisions,” Watson said. Even if the prospect bought from a competitor, he added, a possible sale may be down the road. “You just want to keep your head in the game and stay in touch for that time when they’ll evaluate that solution again.”

One company that is working hard to recycle leads that didn’t pan out the first time is Serena Software. Working with Lenskold since February, the company is analyzing its marketing metrics to better understand its sales

“If just 5% of all leads are
closing, sales thinks the other
95% are junk.”

Jim Lenskold, president, Lenskold Group

pipeline, and—in the words of ed a lead-scoring system, which, Ceri Jones, director of Serena’s Eu- Jones said, ultimately aids lead recy-ropean marketing group—“opti- cling via such things as e-mail, tele-mize the good things.” marketing and webinars. New dash-

“We were not hitting our quarter- boards are providing quick views of ly targets,” Jones said, “so we needed the success of campaigns and prod-a more central conversation with ucts, and Jones said he’s interested in sales.” The company has implement- exploring the Crystalreports service

offered by his CRM vendor, Salesforce.com, for added analysis.

“The speed of our execution is a little slower than we’d like, but we’ve already seen some good output,” Jones said.

With so many fingers and disparate technologies in the lead-recycling pie, trouble can pop up. It’s quite possible for a disconnect to occur between the initial lead-generation process and the re-engagement phase, said Mikel Chertudi, senior director for demand generation at Omniture Inc.

“Here in trying to recycle leads, marketers might overwrite all the sources that brought the lead to them in the first place,” Chertudi said. In fact, Omniture is activity beefing up its own lead re-engagement process.

And when done correctly, Chertudi said, effective lead recycling uncovers seemingly lost opportunities, “people who are ready to talk to sales about our products. You can turn 15% to 25% of these seemingly lost leads into sales or at least sales-ready opportunities.”

and sales, creating a bridge to help develop marketing messages that support field sales. Feedback from sales allows Autodesk to continually improve those messages.

Further, the group ensures that fact sheets and white papers developed by product marketing are consistent with corporate branding messages and with sales’ direct mail campaigns.

The next step for Autodesk, Colombo said, is to cultivate sales execution teams in each of the company’s geographic regions. The company is particularly focusing on its international regions as some 64% of revenue derives from Europe and Asia. To reach those overseas, the company eschews printed sales messages, concentrating instead on the Web.

To aid its new move toward marketing as a facilitator of sales, Autodesk has since 2003 contracted with consultancy and business intelligence firm SiriusDecisions Inc. Last year, Sirius featured Autodesk at its Return on Integration Summit in Las Vegas as an example of a sales-marketing integration best practice.

The emphasis on ensuring marketing’s support of sales and expanded revenue is reflected in Autodesk’s rebound since 2003. Its fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2007, produced revenue of $1.84 billion, up 21% over the previous year, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 20% over the earlier five years.

“It all revolves around trust and transparency,” said Colombo. “Yes, sales and marketing people are different. But this is about saying, ‘OK, there is a difference, but let’s build the trust to understand what the other group does, identify it and then get over it.’ ”