InsightIQ Blog

Selecting Your Marketing Automation Solution - a Two-Part Series (Part II)

May 19 2009

In Part One of this series, I talked through the challenges associated with purchasing or enhancing your marketing automation solution.

Part II: Selecting the Right Solution

In this post, I provide the ten steps to ensure you select the right marketing automation technology to suit your environment, and more importantly, generate the expected return on investment:

Create a detailed description of your current marketing technologies - essentially, a list and description of your existing systems and their architectural components.
Document the current process for capturing, storing and accessing all current and expected customer data.
Describe your marketing technology vision and create a list of your major requirements; organize and prioritize the capabilities needed by each user group.
Determine the gaps of current systems, processes and skill sets to attain the intended marketing technology end state.
Establish a decision matrix to catalog and weight the expected capabilities of the intended solution.
Manage the RFI / RFP and vendor /software review process by focusing on the software feature and function requirements you weighted in the decision matrix.
Identify the new or improved processes that will result from the proposed solutions, and validate the associated infrastructure changes necessary to enable those processes in a production environment.
Prioritize the improvements to the marketing infrastructure and verify the timelines for implementation and adoption of the new processes.
Complete the quantitative analysis (decision matrices) and factor qualitative measures to rate the proposed marketing technology solutions.
Conduct a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis for a minimum three year period for the evaluated applications.

It is not uncommon for this series of steps to take three months or more. In following this methodical approach, by the time the TCO is completed, you should feel confident that you've made the right technology choices and have visibility to the process changes that will be needed for enablement..

It is a lot of work, but bear in mind that failed marketing automation implementations are not normally a reflection of the software, but rather of poor preparation and planning. With an abundance of good solutions on the market that work well, do your homework and make sure that your requirements align to business objectives and not an unrealistic scenario that may have been defined by a software provider.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at joe_kelly@csgsystems.com. Or, to view the first post in the series, click here.

This article is filed under:

View more Blog Posts

Leave Your Comment Comments

Jun 24 2009

# Jill Rowley said:

Joe,

Thanks for the ten steps - this is EXCELLENT.

One step I recommend adding is documenting some use case scenarios. Then, when evaluating the various systems, have each marketing automation vendor demonstrate YOUR use case scenarios.

Can you expand on what factors are important to consider when selecting a marketing automation "vendor" - beyond feature/function?

Thanks!

Jill Rowley
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jillbrewbakerrowley
Eloqua
jill.rowley@eloqua.com
925-984-2731