Avaya Case

Problem Definition It appears that Avaya’s most immediate problem is a noticeable operational “gap” between the marketing and sales departments. Throughout the sales process, the departments are not working together in a cooperative fashion – they’re working separately, and sequentially. This gap not only affects the ways in which the departments interact and communicate, but is also likely affecting sales and demand generation. If there was a new model put in place for sales and marketing to work together, not only would sales and demand generation improve, but efficiency would undoubtedly increase. Due to the current operational model in place with these departments, each has their own systems and processes (funnels) that are un-related and unaligned. There are no established objectives or common goals that the departments share and, as a result, there is a complete lack of systematic devices/models for executing sales and increasing demand cooperatively. From the reading, it’s easy to gather that the organization even lacks a standardized set of parameters for classifying potential and return clients (data evaluation that determines good leads, purchase likelihood, and anticipated purchase timeline is inconsistent). Needless to say, this is a large problem for an organization looking to integrate their efforts to create a flexible, measurable system that increases revenue. Additionally, I feel that their sales force compensation model may be contributing to this problem, because it’s so heavily based on quarterly revenue numbers. In the current model, the sales force has final say on which leads they will pursue, no matter which department they were obtained through. Therefore, it’s not unrealistic to believe that a sales person might reject pursuing a smaller potential client for a larger one, simply based on the status of their current numbers instead of purchase likelihood. I feel that this what Ill was referring to when he