Need a disaster recovery plan for your company’s database? That depends. How do you and your sales team manage your contacts? Would all of your contacts be lost or in jeopardy if your computer crashed or one of your sales guys left tomorrow? If you rely upon many different documents, in many file formats, kept willy-nilly in multiple locations, and maintained haphazardly by many individuals of your team, then you desperately need to reevaluate your approach to customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. It’s a matter of protecting your company’s most important asset—its database. Without it, sales and marketing can’t be effective. I don’t care what you use— Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, ACT, or Siebel—but you do need a central repository and a database management process.

And it’s not as painful as you think. We all know that mandating a sales guy, focused on sales commissions, is not going to get the job done. But, if you assign a marketing resource to play quarterback, and status suspect lists and customers and prospects at regular intervals, the marketing team will be effective in reaching intended targets, and in turn, the sales team will appreciate it. It’s a long-term investment that will allow sales and marketing to better work together.