Marketers often believe their job is done as soon as sales leads start coming in the door. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how marketing dollars are wasted. Successful marketers help turn leads into customer conversions because they understand that sales can be the most valuable metric for measuring new campaigns.

In attempting to fulfill their responsibility to connect campaigns to the bottom line, many marketers discover that their efforts are hampered by poor conversion rates resulting from an underperforming sales team. So, marketing needs to understand how to communicate with the sales department and effectively motivate the team responsible for converting leads. We brought in somebody fluent in the language of sales, Tim Brenton, President of the Brenton Group, Inc., to teach marketers the right questions to ask the sales management team and assess whether the right processes are in place for success.

Delta Airlines just announced that it has eliminated pillows and quit selling food on flights to save money. Clearly they haven't read the growing list of dissatisfied customer postings on flyertalk.com, airlinerage.com, or flightsfromhell.com.

Companies traditionally have looked at customer service issues as separate, and apart, from the sales of the product and based on short-term profitability. Decisions that at first glance don't seem to affect the bottom line immediately are put off if the corporation isn't flush with cash.

In today's texting, YouTube, blogging, mobile messaging, media-obsessed world, consumers can get to the core of every business instantly. And they do. To them, saying what you do is not nearly as important as doing what you say.

You sell more than a service or a product - you are selling a culture, a set of beliefs and your brand's mission. Consistency and transparency throughout every layer of your company influence buying decisions and are directly tied to your bottom line. So, your brand must be clearly understood and embraced by your entire organization.

To create a well-developed brand that's focused on profitability follow these steps: