Oracle Corp. early today announced a new product within its Oracle Advertising and CX suite that it says will help marketers execute advertising campaigns to generate highly qualified sales opportunities.

With the new product, called Oracle Fusion Marketing, marketers can create campaigns that span both traditional marketing and advertising channels. The key ingredient is automation, which helps to bypass the lead qualification process by using artificial intelligence to assess leads automatically, predict when potential buyers are ready to speak to a salesperson and generate qualified sales opportunities, within any customer relationship management system.

Oracle says CRM systems cause lots of frustration for sellers and marketers because workflows are disconnected, there’s too much manual administration involved, and siloed data prevents sales and marketing teams from working with each other to engage customers. As the business-to-business buying process becomes more complex, taking place in a much broader range of digital channels, that only adds to the complexity.

Oracle promises that Fusion Marketing will eliminate much of that complexity. The company says it’s really a kind of campaign orchestration engine that simplifies the creation and execution of campaigns and accelerates their delivery by automating the lead generation process. With the platform, Oracle says, it will be possible to design and orchestrate campaigns across multiple channels within minutes.

Among its features, it uses AI to recommend the best reference story to each target lead, based on the product and the industry, and ensures that same reference story is consistent within emails, in ad creative and on microsites. Oracle Fusion Marketing can also aggregate the interest shown by individual contacts within the same account in order to create an account level score that more accurately reflects the quality of the opportunity, Oracle said.

Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, said it’s necessary to think differently about marketing and sales automation and transform CRM into a system that works for both teams.

“This is not about forecasts and rollups or a reporting tool to see how the sales force is performing, but instead about turning CRM into a system that helps sellers sell,” Tarkoff explained. “A huge part of that change is bringing marketing and sales teams together and eliminating the low-value, time consuming tasks that become a distraction from building customer relationships and closing deals.”

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