Large, mature companies sometimes make money despite themselves. Good products sell themselves. However, those companies could grow larger by easily implementing digital marketing tools. Customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools can identify previously hidden opportunities and new markets. To do so, the organization must add new disciplines.

When working for a Fortune 500 company, I preached the value of these tools to whomever would listen. Unfortunately, most product managers and sales professionals lacked interest; they made money if they did anything or not. One young product manager wanted her product to grow. Using easily accessible internal company and sales data from its CRM (Salesforce.com), sales information from suppliers and a white board, we easily plotted the selling process and identified key hand-offs critical to success. That diagram (documented in an online graphing program) is below.

We set goals.

• Make sure no lead was left behind.
• Get larger opportunities to sales professionals who we knew was competently follow-up on them.
• Get suppliers to close the loop on leads we sent to them.
• Identify the most effective marketing strategies.

After defining and employing clear marketing and sales opportunities, we moved on to watching customer and prospect digital behavior. The magic started to happen. 

Supplier data and digital tracking behavior helped us identify new product applications, opportunities in new industries and supplier customers who could be upgraded to ‘major customer’ status and be brought in-house. Company engineers began working with previously ignored customers and prospects to create next generation products – building a future pipeline of business.

Yes, unforeseen opportunities were won; sales increased. More importantly, this partnership produced trust, cooperation and enthusiasm across marketing, product management and sales. Being open, curious and collaborative drove sales and product growth, plus the exponential benefit of teamwork spread across the division and re-invigorated several products.