Avaya was facing issues with lack of communication between their marketing and sales departments, which led to misaligned goals and decreased performance. To address this, the document recommends restructuring the departments by implementing a single CRM system to improve collaboration, qualify leads jointly, and align marketing and sales strategies. This is estimated to cost $3 million initially and $1.8 million annually but yield a 416% return on investment by doubling qualified leads from marketing to 50% and increasing revenue projections.

1. Avaya
Executive Summary
Avaya is a young company with a bright future. As a spin off of two prosperous
companies both Lucent and AT&T, it has inherited both the continuous history of innovation
with the attraction of youth which continues to draw elite talent.
Upon studying the case provided by Harvard Publishing; it was apparent that from the
lack of communication between the marketing and sales department to the misdirection of their
new customer profile and target market, changes needed to be made to provide cohesion between
the departments. Both the sales and marketing funnel which had previous decades of success,
continuously fell short of the organization's goals. In addition, goals were not aligned which
caused conflict, decreased morale and deteriorated an otherwise healthy business culture. As a
team, we debated over the 3 alternatives to alleviate the friction between the departments and
align both to Avaya’s goals. Our alternatives: weekly collaboration to promote better
communication; utilize inbound content platforms that offers buyer persona driven content; and
finally implementing a single CRM system. We recommend restructuring the marketing and
sales departments by enactin a single CRM system which would result in better communication
and a healthier revenue funnel.
Key Problems
One of Avaya’s main issues was that there was no communication between the marketing
and sales departments. It seemed to be that the marketing department, after switching target
markets in 2005, haven't been able to pinpoint their target market and generate qualified leads for
the sales department. The marketing department believed they were generating quality leads for
the sales team. However; the sales team’s closing percentage continuously decreased. The

2. Avaya
Sales department wanted to receive more leads that were viable for close. This will, in turn,
increase revenue .
The sales department needed to find more prospects for future quarters in addition to the
current one. Too much focus was on the current quarter rather than future potential leads. Due
to this, the next quarter lacks in closed deals and revenue. Sales managers wanted the marketing
department to figure out the problem of not reaching the target market. In addition they wanted
effective leads to generate more revenue.
Alternatives
In order for there to be more effective lead generation efforts, the sales and marketing
teams need to work together. Communications between the two teams is critical in setting goals
and planning, so as our first alternative, we recommend the teams meet in weekly collaboration
sessions. These sessions will serve as opportunities for the sales and marketing teams to
strategize and monitor current campaigns together. A potential difficulty will be in keeping
employee morale high, as any new department restructuring is disruptive and can make
employees feel uncomfortable. We recommend slowly introducing the concept to your teams and
being transparent in the motivation so as to minimize friction. We estimate this initiative will
take six weeks to be fully operational with no upfront cost, though time normally spent on sales
calls is reduced.
Adopting an entirely inbound marketing model is another viable solution for increasing
sales and marketing collaboration. “Companies that utilize inbound content platforms and offer
buyer persona driven content see a 45% increase in the volume of Sales Accepted Leads.”
(Kapost). Reports show buyers are engaging with salespeople later in the decision process and
are seeking information digitally. Having salespeople contact those that have sought out or

3. Avaya
engaged with marketing content increases the likelihood of conversion. By engaging with
potential leads and tracking open rates and other metrics, marketing efforts have quantitative data
to help shape future strategies. Switching to a completely inbound methodology will require four
weeks of training for marketing employees and two weeks for sales employees.
Our final alternative is to introduce both teams to a single software solution. As Avaya is
currently structured, the sales and marketing department operate as separate entities. To unify
their mutual goal of generating qualified leads, we recommend implementing a single CRM
system. In utilizing a single system to capture marketing and sales activities and campaigns,
teams can then make strategic decisions. With an investment of $3,000,000 we will see an ROI
of 416% . The new CRM will take 30 days to integrate with the existing Avaya sales and
marketing stacks, and an additional 30 days to train staff to be proficient in using the tool.
Recommendation
From the case we were able to identify the root cause of Avaya’s problem: it is the lack
of cooperation between the marketing team and the sales team. Stemming from that, we have
noticed several sub-problems such as inefficient sales and marketing funnels, inconsistency
between qualifications of leads generated by the marketing team versus the sales team, and also
inability to properly execute on a new marketing strategy. We recommend restructuring the
marketing and sales departments to work side by side to increase cohesion between their efforts.
We suggest implementing a new, single CRM system that marketing and sales would use in
conjunction, allowing the sales team’s input into marketing and prospecting strategies, qualifying
leads simultaneously, and merging the sales funnels to flow harmoniously.

4. Avaya
The CRM system we recommend will be SalesForce’s cloud based CRM system
lightning enterprise edition. With features such as campaign management, web-to-lead capture,
and einstein lead scoring the sales team will be able to rank leads coming from the marketing
campaigns as they travel down the funnel. In 2015 only 25% of the leads coming from the
marketing team were considered “qualified”. With this new CRM system we are forecasting with
the tools SalesForce are able to offer we can increase qualified leads to 50% coming from our
new marketing and sales department. SalesForce CRM system will cost $150 per license per
month. With our 2500 sales reps we plan to allow access to 1000 sales members. This cost will
be $150,000 per month or $1,800,000 per year. SalesForce offers free training with the license
so we will not have to directly pay for training. We plan to train our sales team in segments to
minimize the amount of revenue lost due to lost opportunities to sell. Opportunity cost estimated
to be $1,000,000 worth of sales.
The ability for our sales members to input into the marketing and prospecting strategies
will have to effects. The first effect will be the time sales members are spending working directly
with the marketing team. This will be an opportunity cost missing out on the time they could be
doing their own prospecting. With sales team members currently producing an average of 75%
of the qualified leads; We plan to lower that to 50% and increase marketing's contribution to
50%. So although we won’t be losing direct revenue we will be spending time training our
marketing team on how to better qualify leads. Estimation is $200,000 worth of opportunity cost
for our sales members to train marketing team on qualifications.
Merging the sales funnels will be a new non directs costing aspect of our restructuring.
We will not lose out on revenue, but our CMO and Head of Sales Operations will need to spend
time creating one cohesive sales and marketing funnel. This will take time and estimation will be

5. Avaya
30 days till implementation. This will allow the marketing and sales team time in each location
to restructure the floor plans to work side by side.
Overall we plan to have implementation of our new CRM system up and running within
30 days, training for our employees will take approximately 30 days, and relocation of business
units will take 30 days. Two will be able to overlap so overall elapsed time will be 60 days. Our
overall cost for the restructuring will be $3,000,000 initially and a $1,800,000 recurring cost per
year for the CRM. With the estimations being calculated by the marketing team being able to
bring in double the amount of qualified leads, and estimated revenue contributions in 2005 from
marketing being 1,225.5M increasing to 2,500M. Our return on investment will be 416%.
Works Cited
“B2B Sales & Marketing Funnel -.” CustomShow - The Premier Presentation Software
Tool, 26 Apr. 2017, www.customshow.com/b2b-sales-marketing-funnel/. Accessed 11 Sept.
2017.
Harvard Case. cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/content/68146848. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.
Krishnaswamy, Philip KotlerNeil RackhamSuj. “Ending the War Between Sales and
Marketing.” Harvard Business Review, 20 July 2017, hbr.org/2006/07/ending-the-war-between-
sales-and-marketing. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.
“Marketing Funnels And Buyer Journeys: What Are We Arguing About?” MarTech
Today, 5 Feb. 2016, martechtoday.com/marketing-funnels-buyer-journeys-arguing-161879.
Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.

6. Avaya
Parmelee, Ali. “Let's THINK about Digital Marketing.” Integrated Sales and Marketing:
5 Reasons Why Integration is Valuable, www.thinkcreativegroup.com/blog/5-reasons-why-
marketing-and-sales-integration-is-valuable. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.
Sheldon, Michael. “Marketing & Sales: Frienemies Forever!” THE HARTFORD, 16 Aug.
2016, www.thehartford.com/business-playbook/marketing-sales. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.