Part 1 of 2 - Selecting Your Marketing Automation Solution
It's a fact: Those organizations that take the time to carefully assess the current state of their marketing systems and processes before developing plans to enhance or replace their existing marketing systems will see better and faster returns on their investment.
In this two-part blog series, I'll discuss ways to ensure your marketing automation technology selection & implementation is successful. And, it doesn't start with the software; it begins with a vision.
Part I: Getting Started.
Before engaging with marketing automation providers, establish your marketing technology vision and assess whether or not your current assets and processes can be modified, upgraded or integrated with other systems to attain the desired results. This may seem like a common sense approach, but surprisingly, many organizations begin by focusing on tool reviews. In actuality, an initial evaluation might help you conclude that only a change in a process or the better use of the current applications may net the desired result.
There are countless stories of unsuccessful or way over-budget marketing automation initiatives and such stories usually start with an initial focus on tool evaluations or an emphasis on what can be up and running quickly. Not surprisingly, most providers focus on the "sizzle" and promise of their applications. Of course, their features and functions will sound like 'must haves', but these providers don't (and can't) account for your current infrastructure or processes nor can they determine if their solutions are truly realistic in your environment.
In truth, most marketing organizations continuously evolve the processes related to their marketing technology. When considering enhancements, you must keep in mind the changes such enhancements will make to your efforts and recognize the additional organizational, process and support requirements needed. To be clear, a process change is often required to ensure success, but any change in process should support the goals of the business, not the success of the marketing automation tool.
In the next part of the series, I'll share with you the ten steps to ensure you select the right marketing automation technology.
If you have any questions, please contact me at joe_kelly@csgsystems.com
Leave Your Comment Comments
This is a great post. Tools alone should never be the focus but it should be in conjunction and alignment with overall vision and processes.
Joe - This is an important and timely topic. Selecting a vendor, getting installed and proving fast value, and then growing over time are all important stages to ensuring marketing automation success.
We recently gave a webinar with David Raab, author of the Raab Guide to Demand Generation systems, on this exact topic:
http://www.marketo.com/demo/right-start-demand-gen-systems/player.html
Joe,
Thank you for elevating the topic of marketing automation and making the point about the work that should be done up-front before selecting a tool. With the growth in the space, there are new "tool" providers that underscore the need to do the up-front business process work that is necessary for success.
Marketing automation is the approach by which marketers harmoniously blend technology development with strict process management to significantly enhance marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
If a vendor is telling you that marketing automation is EASY, you are getting pitched. Run!
SiriusDecisions recently conducted a webinar The State of Marketing Automation and concluded with the following points:
• The demand waterfall helps to determine which processes are worth your time to develop, refine and automate.
• Marketing automation is critical to achieving best-in-class conversion rates.
• Services become an important differentiator in a commoditized technology market.
• Leveraging the full potential of a MAP relies on a vendor’s experience in driving organization adoption.
• Only when proper skills and processes are wrapped around technology will meaningful results be realized.
• Organizations that use technology alone to solve demand creation issues may experience a negative ROI.
The DMA Marketing Technology Council discovered
"A significant skill gap continues to divide the "marketing" and "technology" factions within organization, impeding faster and more successful marketing automation implementation."
"A shortage of trained marketing automation professionals - capable of addressing challenges relating to marketing process as well as technology - will drive marketers and technology developers to aggressively cultivate these capabilities in-house: organizations that already recruit and nurture these resources will enjoy a significant competitive market advantage."
At Eloqua, we say Marketing is HARD.
Technology doesn’t make it EASY
Our Expertise helps you solve your challenges by developing your HUMAN RESOURCES. Our product enables the solution that marketers develop.
Check out our approach at http://marketinginsights.eloqua.com/mem/
Keep the conversation going, please!!!
Jill Rowley
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jillbrewbakerrowley
Eloqua (for seven years)
jill.rowley@eloqua.com
925-984-2731
Joe,
Great post! How true. This is very counter intuitive for most clients, because they think they are short circuting and speeding up the process by picking the tool and often realize too late that they have made a mistake, but then have no choice but to live with the consequences. The tool is a replaceable and sometimes fungible. Some of them can even be purchased with a good credit card these days. A well thought out and efficient process, on the other hand, is priceless!