DemandGen Report

SiriusDecisions recently named CyberSource and Omniture as recipients of its Third Annual Return on Integration (ROI) awards. Designed to recognize and celebrate superior sales and marketing alignment performance, the awards were presented by SiriusDecisions during its 2009 "Leaders and Lessons Learned" Summit held May 13-15 at the Fairmont Scottsdale Resort in Scottsdale, AZ.

The winners were selected from organizations SiriusDecisions has observed implementing winning strategies by applying innovative sales and marketing integration practices to maximize top-line growth.

"Visibility into and understanding of where to focus marketing efforts to drive sales productivity and growth is critical in any economy, but even more so in today's challenging times," said Richard Eldh, SiriusDecisions co-founder and conference chair. "The companies honored at this year's Summit have made significant strides, with quite different approaches, to bridge the gap between sales and marketing through executive leadership dedicated to alignment of the functions - and the results they've realized are a testament to their hard work, talent and innovation."

The 2009 award winners each utilize a threefold strategy for sales and marketing integration, according to Eldh. That includes: the use of a consistent, multidimensional communications strategy; the leveraging of leading-edge technologies; and the achievement of a general consensus in terms of sales and marketing goals, resources and processes.

The Third Annual SiriusDecisions ROI awards were presented to the following executives on behalf of the two companies:

• CyberSource - Perry Dembner, Vice President of Marketing, and Brenda Kring, Director of Demand Generation
• Omniture - Gail Ennis, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, and Mikel Chertudi, Vice President of Demand Marketing

The winners were selected for demonstrating the following criteria:

• Unique integration of sales and marketing processes
• Interdependent relationship between sales and marketing
• Strong alignment of goals between sales and marketing
• Advanced systems to enable alignment
• Ability to measure results effectively

"It is an honor to receive this award on behalf of CyberSource; it validates our commitment to drive process improvements and growth through marketing and sales alignment," said Dembner.

"We take great pride in the Demand to Brand framework we've developed at Omniture, so we view this award as exciting validation from SiriusDecisions that our sales and marketing alignment efforts are pace setting and on target," said Gail Ennis. Added Omniture colleague Mikel Chertudi: "We view this award as strong validation for all business-to-business marketers who combine people, process, and technology to deliver stellar results."
Since its inception, eight companies have now earned the SiriusDecisions ROI award. Current honorees CyberSource and Omniture join Autodesk, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, SAP AG, CA, Cognos, an IBM company, and newScale.