Introducing marketing automation to your company requires a cultural mindshift. Steve Woods, chief technology officer at Eloqua provides his top tips for getting everyone onboard
Industry analysts following the marketing automation space agree it’s expanding and that we can expect to see growth this year and beyond. Analyst firm SiriusDecisions expects the adoption of marketing automation to increase 50 per cent by 2015 according to the 2012 State of Demand Generation Report.
The majority of those looking to implement a marketing automation solution need to get buy-in first. Building a strong business case is key but takes time and resources. Below are three steps to help you build a business case for marketing automation.
1. Internal support
The first step is to ensure you have some internal influencers on your side. It’s critical those involved in the decision understand the technology landscape. There are a lot of tools out there so it’s easy to get confused.
To make a solid business case with internal influencers, you’ll have to differentiate the technologies, as well as explain how they fit together.
Email service provider versus marketing automation: The majority of businesses see great value in email marketing. But in assuming your business wants to do more than send out ‘batch and blast’ communications, there are critical capabilities marketing automation has over email service providers.
With marketing automation, communications are triggered when prospects perform certain actions and targeted content is sent based on where the prospect is in the sales cycle.
CRM and marketing automation: There is a question about the differences between CRM systems (e.g. Salesforce) and marketing automation. In short, CRM provides leads to the sales team, but marketing automation gives a deeper understanding of these leads. Integrating the two systems provides more in-depth detail about leads within the database.
2. Buy-in from the C-suite
Once the internal influencers in your company have a better understanding of the overall marketing technology landscape and where marketing automation fits in, you can go up a level for executive buy-in.
Convince the CEO: The CEO thinks non-stop about numbers and measurement in general. This is where revenue performance management (RPM), which is enabled by marketing automation, is sure to catch the CEO’s attention.
RPM is a business strategy for managing a company’s interactions with buyers through the entire purchase process to enable more predictable, rapid and profitable revenue growth.
Convince the CFO: The CFO typically views the sales and marketing expense as a black hole. CFOs care about growing the business by making the right investments and these investments should achieve the proper return.
Marketing automation can measure everything from the time a lead is generated until it translates into real revenue, and marketers can see how programmes are performing to better quantify return on today’s spending.
Convince the CIO: When it comes to your IT department, explain how an investment in marketing automation is a win for both marketing and IT. This is because a marketing automation solution can tie together disparate reporting mechanisms, greatly improve data integrity via built-in analytics tools and data normalisation, and provide more IT power and functionality without a large investment in time and resources.
Convince the CRO/VP of sales: The best way to get your head of sales onboard is to discuss a major benefit of marketing automation – sales and marketing alignment. With lead scoring, for example, marketing can get more qualified leads to sales. Sales can then focus on quality leads, which will inevitably increase close rates, and improve revenue.
3. Setting expectations
Setting expectations of marketing automation is important for building your business case because marketing automation is more than a technology.
To be successful, companies must be prepared to change internal processes. Set an achievable timeframe for rolling out marketing automation. Keep several factors in mind such as the size of your organisation, integration with the CRM system, and the size of your marketing team. Finally, take a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach and remind your team that marketing automation is a journey.
