While a prospect may not use those exact words, they don't care whether your company's marketing and sales organizations are in sync or not. What they do care about is receiving too many unnecessary, non-targeted, or irrelevant email communications from your company that perhaps they didn't even want to receive in the first place.

Both email marketing and customer relationship management tools have become ubiquitous in many B-to-B organizations. Yet each tool not only has unique messaging functionality, they also both have unique customer databases. When companies don't integrate the databases into one, the resulting uncoordinated marketing and sales messages can translate to lost deals:

• "This company contacts me too much."
• "Why doesn't the rep know anything about this offer I just received from her company?"
• "This email doesn't match what the sales rep told me."
• "I didn't request that type of information. Why are they sending me this email now?"

Email marketers face a major challenge keeping their online marketing database in sync with the sales team's CRM system. And, if a sales representative hasn't updated some records, or if the data changes from the time it's imported to when the campaign is actually sent, the marketer may not be sending to the entire list.

What's more, sales reps may be informed by marketing when a campaign has been sent, but they have no way of knowing whether or not the prospect opened or clicked on the message. There is simply no way to feed that data from the email marketing tool back to the CRM. As a result, the sales rep misses out on valuable information about the prospect's interest level during the sales cycle.

Disconnect, frustration, lost opportunities.

Fortunately, many of today's email marketing and CRM tools now work together. For example, if your marketing organization uses Lyris HQ for your email marketing, and your sales organization uses Sales force for its CRM, you can download Lyris' free application that connects the two. The main benefits of doing so are:

• Marketing and sales can work from a single database of record that automatically updates with email marketing results
• A sales rep can see which email campaigns were sent, and how individual prospects responded
• A marketer can use sales fields to segment campaigns for more relevant messaging based on where prospects are in the sales cycle.

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