Marketer accountability and alignment with sales drove the discussion last month at the annual summit staged by sales and marketing consultancy Sirius- Decisions.

“You have to determine what it's worth to give marketing a dollar, because marketing is either part of the solution or a cost center,” said Megan Heuer, Sirius- Decisions' service director, at the company's Summit 2011 in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Heuer outlined five trends that will inform marketing's accountability in the future: investing in online channels, the accelerating dominance of content in support of marketing objectives, the need for marketing to be intimately involved in sales enablement, the increasing importance of marketing technology and the central role played by strong data.

“What is the cost of a bad record?” Heuer asked. “If one bad record gets into your database and you look to fix it at the point of entry, that will cost you $1. But if it lives there for a year and you market to it, it will cost you $100 to fix it and another $100 in lost opportunities at the end of the year.”

Successful marketers feed sales success, which drives revenue, as was illustrated by several case studies presented at the summit. A common thread was overcoming the typical sales-rep weakness for volume, and even more volume, of sales leads.

“We'd ask our marketing department when a lead was sales-ready, and they'd answer, "If a prospect can fog a mirror,' ” said Stephan Gray, VP-corporate marketing at workforce management technology company Kronos Inc. “Our lead-development reps had no lead-scoring method because they were paid by how many leads got through to the field. You can imagine how many they threw in.”

Gray worked with sales to develop a 100-point scoring system based on the familiar BANT formula of budget, authority, need and time frame, and set the conversion threshold at 85 (“That's pretty high,” he said). Kronos also adopted the Net Promoter score concept, assessing how many customers would recommend the company to friends, and is working to improve that metric.

“Once a quarter, we read through all the verbatims, and I think this is really helping us,” Gray said.

F5 Networks, a provider of IT networking solutions, also was experiencing a welter of leads going nowhere. Before addressing sales-marketing alignment, Kirby Wads-worth, VP-global marketing, said: “Leads were going into the proverbial black hole.” As with Kronos, inside sales employees were not being compensated in ways aligned with lead flow, he said.

F5 also built a collaborative scoring model, featuring about 30 qualifying elements, that both sales and marketing agreed on. A score of 300 moved the prospect to sales; less than that, and it was shifted into the nurturing process.

“We needed a better place to find gold in the dirt,” Wadsworth said. And while success is still a work in progress, he said, “We did build a system that stopped more crud from going into the system.”

Marketers presenting case studies detailed processes that used the SiriusDecisions' “demand waterfall” idea, whereby prospects proceed from inquiry, to marketing-qualified lead, to sales-accepted lead, to sales-qualified lead, to closed sale. The most critical point in the process, said Tony Jaros, SiriusDecisions VP-research, is marketing's handoff to sales of sales-accepted leads. Here, sales should—ideally—actively and enthusiastically accept marketing's recommendation.

“You want to formalize this handoff between marketing and sales,” Jaros said.

SiriusDecisions research, unveiled at the conference, showed that top-performing companies qualify a greater proportion of prospects at each step in the demand waterfall than do average-performing companies. The gap is particularly large in the sales- accepted lead handoff, where sales actively buys into marketing's assessment.

“Best-in-class” companies move 9.3% of their inquiries into marketing-qualified leads; 85.0% of MQLs move to sales-accepted leads; 61.7% of those become sales-qualified leads; and finally, 29.1% of SQLs result in closed business among top-performing companies.

While average-performing companies achieve 2.89 wins per 1,000 initial inquires, best-in-class companies average 14.23 sales per inquiry, Jaros said.

“This is real money, and signals a significantly better relation between sales and marketing,” he said. “Best-in-class companies are doing targeting and segmenting better, their messages and offers are better, their teleprospecting is good and sales trusts what they're getting from marketing and are willing to spend time working it.”

Echoing both Kronos and F5, SiriusDecisions executives stressed that sales must be “pulled into the fold” by marketing. “It's not a question of adding systems to fix sales and marketing alignment but rather a challenge of leadership,” said John Neeson, SiriusDecisions' managing director. “It's about two leaders—the heads of marketing and sales—fixing things together.”

For sales-marketing initiatives to be effective, Neeson added, both functions need C-suite buy-in.

“CFOs must begin to think about marketing not so much as an expense but rather as an investment,” Neeson said.