I have a plant that lives in our house. It is a variety of the Dracaena family of tropical plants. It has long green leaves that come out of a central trunk. As I recall, I purchased it about seven years ago. It resides beside our deck door so it can get sunlight through the glass. In the middle of every week we have watering Wednesday at our house, when I give the old Dracaena roots their drink for the week. It was about 12 inches tall when I bought it. It is now taller than I am.

 It is not hard to understand that when you neglect to give a houseplant proper water at regular intervals, it will wither and die. You have to take care of the roots. It is funny how it is easy to recognize this in a houseplant, but not in your business. Let me speak to the disconnect that sometimes happens between sales and marketing. If I could make things relatively simple, I would say the function of marketing is to get the customer ready to make a purchase. Whether we are selling something to a new customer or we are retaining an old customer, this is the primary responsibility of marketing. Marketing feeds the leads to sales, who make the offer to the customer (touts the quality, negotiates a price, ensures delivery is within the customer's time frame, etc.) and closes the deal. This is the way it supposed to work.

 What happens when there is a breakdown of the marketing-to-sales cycle? In this day where business lead information is readily available, especially from your online statistics gathered around your e-marketing efforts, it is really ridiculous that this info never makes it to the sales staff. Most companies are paying precious marketing dollars to keep their website information up to date and may have dabbled in social media, email marketing or other formats that are relatively easy to track customer interaction. However, more companies than not never share this interaction with the sales team for follow up. If that describes your company, the sales plant is withering from thirsty roots.

The good news is, there is a very easy fix. There are a variety of simple online CRM solutions that track leads through the sales process so that everyone can see what action has been taken on the prospect. This can also be used in conjunction with retention marketing and sales. Sites like Zoho.com, Leadmaster.com and Salesforce.com are some of the more common CRM sites.

On a more basic level are the analytical statistics that are available for web sites, e-mail marketing tools and social media. You may have the perspective that your website is nothing more than pure information and has nothing to do with marketing. If that is your thinking, you are missing a golden opportunity to feed leads to your sales team. On the marketing level, you should be comparing the Page Views and Visits you are receiving on your web site. What are your potential customers looking at on your web site? What search terms are they using to find you? How are they finding you? This information needs to be placed in the hands of your sales staff. This gives them a good indication of what is hot and what is not in your product offerings. For instance, if you are a hardware store and are advertising a special on shovels and you get 10,000 visitors on your web site looking at your shovels page, there is a good indication that shovels will sell well this week. You would want to display the shovels in a strategic place in your store. The sales staff should mention shovels to anyone coming into the store. If you are doing social media marketing or are sending out e-blasts using an e-mail marketing tool, you can drill down in the demographics to gain more information about your potential customers. If you are using a social media site, you can find out what type of person is looking at your ads. Are they young or old? Are they male or female? Did they pass your ad on to their friends? With e-mail marketing tools, you can pull information on the specific individual who is looking at your ads and subsequent landing pages. If I know that Joe Smith from my city's street department is looking at my shovels, I want my sales staff to give Joe a call, go meet him and find out if he would like to place an order for shovels.