I fear we are not being critical enough of MA platforms. What are barriers MA vendors can control?

There is a lot of value locked away in MA system vendor's offerings. What I mean by that is that customers can reduce sales and marketing costs, close more deals more efficiently, and provide better overall customer experiences by taking full advantage of the capabilities of most major marketing automation applications. Unfortunately, many customers never get to the point where they realize the full value of the investment. What can MA companies do to help?

1. Better helping users to understand and adopt their technology.

When I was in the MA industry, I used to say that the best position to be in the industry was an implementation partner. At the time, we were just starting our partner program and partners were getting to use our world-class sales team to source deals for themselves and getting tons of service revenue without having to spend much in marketing and sales for themselves. I think we did a good job explaining to the market WHY they needed MA for their business, but we relied on our partners to explain HOW to get from where they were presently to how to achieve marketing success.

I should point out that in the intervening years, MA companies have gotten MUCH better about this second part, but they could do more to help customers understand the lifecycle of adopting marketing automation technology for small, medium and enterprise sized organizations.

2. Periodic heath checks

Let's face it: Marketers are infrequent purchasers of major technology for their companies and that means we're not always so great at it. One of the things vendors can do is to help their customers determine how far along the the marketing "maturity" path they are, what they are doing well, and where (and how) to improve. Since most MA vendors are on-demand, they live and die by their attrition numbers, so keeping customers happy and feeling successful is the key to loyalty and increased revenues.

3. Understandable pricing.

When I first bought MA technology, seven years ago, I paid according to the number of transactions, basically the number of "hits" to the database we made as an organization. This pricing, based on page views, forms submitted, etc. created unpredictable pricing, something I could not reliably budget for from quarter to quarter. In fact, the more successful I was in my campaigns, the more hits to the database and the more I would have to pay! It was possible some quarters for the success of my campaigns to translate into short-term pain as I had to go beg the finance department for a mid-year increase in my marketing budget!

Nowadays, vendors pricing is a lot more predictable. But it's still not priced to value. While it's challenging to determine the economic impact of a single piece of functionality (lead scoring, landing pages), allowing more ala carte pricing will smooth a marketer's tradition from less sophisticated marketing technologies (like email platforms) to fully featured MA applications.

There are other things MA companies can do to help grow the industry (like focusing on other verticals) and make it easier to use their technology (like focusing on user interfaces, something the leaders have been doing a great job on the past year or so). But I'll stop here.