Digital Prospecting

1. Team 9: Avaya Case study
Executive Summary
Avaya, an IP service provider company, is pursuing a plan to improve its Marketing
effectiveness in demand generation. In other words, the Sales and Marketing Departments are
working to generate more and effective leads.
The main challenges that the company needs to overcome to achieve this goal are: (1)
lack of communication between the marketing and sales departments, (2) disparity in goals and
metrics, and (3) a lack of direction and leadership from the President of Global Sales and
Marketing, Louis D’Ambrosio.
After an extensive strategic analysis, two potential solutions were discovered: (1) the
creation of a well-defined lead generation protocol and (2) the integration of the Marketing and
Sales funnels.
The creation of a lead generation protocol will enable Avaya to feed the sales funnels for
future quarters; establish a better communication between departments and help determine what
a useful lead is. On the other hand, the implementation process will take a significative amount
of time, and there will be a steep learning curve towards this process.
The integration of Marketing and Sales funnels will enable Avaya to achieve common
goals and metrics between departments, a much closer alignment between the new integrated
funnel and the customer journey, and a bilateral improvement due to much more responsive and
closer feedback between departments. On the other hand, Avaya will need to redefine their
concept of “lead”, retrain its employees, and create a management network.
We think that the best course of action is merging the marketing and sales departments
into one hybrid department. This process will involve: replacing the current president of the

2. department, developing standardized measures for success, and merging the individual funnels
into one. We chose this approach because it will eradicate the root problems, in the long-run is
feasible and practical, and highly profitable with an estimated ROI of 209.09%.
Analysis:
If sales is the engine driving growth of a company, then marketing is the fuel that powers
the engine; they must work seamlessly together to take the business from where it is currently to
where it should be. In other words, sales is a subset of marketing. Marketing focuses on
identifying and fulfilling the needs of the customer, while sales focuses on presenting the final
product and helping the customer understand why the must have it ending in a sale. In 2005,
Avaya was not firing on all cylinders and there was a disconnect between the two vital
components that needed to be figured out before they could reach their full potential. Our
findings of the case are: lack of communication between the departments, absence of common
goals, and the biggest problem of all; the lack of direction and leadership from the President of
Global Sales and Marketing Louis D’Ambrosio.
As stated in the reading, the heads of each individual department recognized the same
problem and took it upon themselves to try and solve it. While the ability to recognize and try
and tackle problems by themselves is admirable, it is just a another manifestation of the same
symptom. Lack of communication between departments has the ability to to metastasize into
much bigger problems. As human beings we tend to focus on our own responsibilities and
without input from other sources almost always focus on our own needs. This can lead to
animosity between the departments pitting one against the other in a never ending cycle of
infighting.

3. When success within an organization is measured by different metrics there is no
incentive for one department to work with another if they can achieve their goals independently.
In this case we have both marketing and sales claiming victory when 75% of leads that are
generated occurred within the sales department. The system that Avaya had in place was
inefficient at best, setting standards for one department that did not translate into production for
the other. By having two different standards of success, Avaya essentially tied one arm behind
their back in the middle of a prize fight.
Goals, direction, and standards within an organization all come from the top of the
hierarchy pyramid. Louis D’Ambrosio failed to provide these key elements of success to his
sales and marketing team. Without the guidance from the top level the sales and marketing teams
were working against each other instead of together, both issues mentioned above could have
been avoided entirely. Leaders need to recognize issues before they become problems, provide
direction before the team is off track, and most importantly build a cohesive team.
To steer the ship in the right direction, it is in our opinion, necessary for both sales and
marketing to work in accordance with one another as one hybrid organization with a new leader
at the helm. This objective can be achieved by implementing one of the following scenarios.
Proposed Solutions:
Creating a more well-defined lead generation protocol.
Avaya’s Sales and Marketing departments currently generate leads separate of each other.
This process creates many inefficiencies including: lack of communication, lack of planning, and
lack of feedback. If the leadership at Avaya were to dictate a direct protocol for qualifying leads,
and where each department works within that protocol inefficiencies can be minimized. For
example, if Sales were to take over lead generation, the Sales department would: acquire

4. prospects from the Marketing department, qualify prospects, organize prospects based on
projected close date, and time in quarter (which would allow for preparation of next quarter
sales), proceed with sales process, and provide feedback to Marketing department to better
identify prospects. Any process similar to this will provide the Marketing and Sales department
Structure, and protocol which will allow them to: better qualify leads, feed the funnel for next
quarter, and have overall better communication between the departments. Creating a
standardized protocol for the two departments will improve communication between the two
departments, and create a clear direction for the departments to go in the future. A disadvantage
to implementing this process would be the amount of time necessary to find the most effective
process. As well as educating employees worldwide on the new protocol.
Integration of Funnels.
Avaya’s Sales and Marketing department lacks communication. Improving
communication between the departments would allow the departments to have better goal
establishment, qualification of leads, plan closes based on the quarters, and give feedback to one
another to better performance. Ideally, the result would be integrating the two funnels into one
where Sales and Marketing have access to leads at every step of the process. The integration
would allow both departments to work together to better attain common goals. The new process
is illustrated on the following page:

5. The Illustrated process also allow for a more fluid customer journey. If at any point a
prospect or lead is not ready to move in the next step of process, the Marketing or Sales
department can work to move the potential client to the next position; as well as if the
prospect/lead is ready to move further in the process. The Marketing and Sales departments can
work together to get the potential client to the appropriate position in the funnel. A fluid process
like this will allow the departments to better plan the quarters based on prospects/lead position in
the funnel. This integrated process will also harbor better communication and feedback creating
more efficient lead generation data. Integrating the two funnels of the Marketing and Sales
department into a “marketing” funnel will address improve the communication and direction of
the two departments allowing them to improve performance overall. Disadvantages to this
process are mistaking where prospect/lead is located in the customer journey. Other
disadvantages include: defining metrics, creating a management network, and retraining
employees.
Recommendation

6. In our opinion, the best course of action to resolve the issues Avaya is facing is by
merging the marketing and sales departments into one hybrid department. This process will
involve replacing the current president of the department, developing standardized measures for
success, and merging the individual funnels into one. Everyone needs to be on the same page and
moving toward a common goal within in an organization for the desired outcome to occur.
Implementing the steps laid out will achieve that goal.
Outcome
We estimate that it will cost Avaya approximately 2 million dollars to implement our
plan. This figure includes costs associated with retooling the sales/marketing funnel, training,
and merging the departments. However, we have not included the compensation package for the
outgoing President of Global Sales and Marketing; there are too many variables that factor into
the formula. Adding an estimate of what we think he will receive upon his departure will bring
our total cost to 3.5 million dollars and we estimate a 15% increase in revenue.
$4,902 x .15= 735.3
(735.3-3.5)/3.5=209.09
ROI=209.09
Dollars amounts in millions