Building sales pipeline (or funnel) is key to the bottom line. Marketing's prime directive is to insure that Sales meets its committed forecast, therefore Marketing must take a proactive partnership role with Sales throughout the entire revenue building process.

Size your opportunities before marketing to them.

Marketing can help Sales meet its commitments.

There are multiple actions that Marketing should take to support the Sales Plan. One obvious, but often overlooked action, is to allocate appropriate budget to help realize Sales goals. The slide entitled "Marketing Planning Based on Sales Plan" shows one of several combinations of Marketing and Sales perspectives that I use during the Marketing planning process. This particular data provides a starting point for prioritizing activities based on product opportunity by region, target prospect groups, and prospective customer titles.

Demand generation is one of the key marketing tactics for driving sales activity. But rather than broadly committing resources, I use weighted averages of revenue based on forecasted close rates so that Marketing can identify potential regional shortfalls and then proactively turn on activities to grow demand and deliver to plan.