How long does it take to implement a marketing automation solution?

Great question, and if I can paraphrase a bit from the responses above, it comes down to a definition of what "implementing marketing automation" is defined as. This is both the amount of business process change you are looking at and the complexity of the organization you are part of.

To put some tangible values against that statement:

Lead nurturing:
- sending a sequence of 3 automated emails; hours or a few days in whatever technology platform you choose
- mapping a buying process and a nurturing process against this to use automated lead nurturing against a prospect base; iterating and learning over a few months is probably required

Lead scoring:
- building out a basic lead scoring algorithm that looks at fit and engagement and applies a score; hours or a few days
- changing the behavior of sales so they agree with the scoring criteria in use, and have changed their calling process to only engage with qualified leads, rather than cold calling; probably at least a few iterative learnings of what makes a good lead by analyzing deal flow out of sales, so at least a couple of deal cycles

Analysis:
- running reports on email, landing page, form conversion rates; pretty much instantaneous
- building metrics across a buying process from awareness through to close, and having the depth of metrics to make decisions on what concrete actions to take to improve the business; this will evolve over a few quarterly board/executive reporting cycles to include more metrics, and know how to digest them

So... the answer is "it depends". Simple is fast but is limited in terms of how much value it contributes. Changing business processes adds tremendous value, but takes time.

I hope Chris isn't too confused: he has three excellent but different answers from three industry experts. What's clear is that you can't use a marketing automation system effectively until you've mapped out your processes. Ideally you'd do this before you bought you system so you could use those processes to define you requirements. But in the real world, people aren't necessarily so organized. We did a (small, unscientific) survey last year that found most people do get basic features (email, landing pages, CRM integration, campaign reporting) working right away, and then they take two or three months to get to more advanced features (lead scoring, Web analytics, multi-step campaigns, ROI reporting). We also concluded that people who didn't have their process planned out when they turned on the system took two or three months to recover. My interpretation is it takes that same two or three months to prepare whether you do it before buying your system or after. You can download the survey report from the Raab Guide Web site at http://www.raabguide.com/images/resources/demand_generation_deployment_survey...

So I guess I come out pretty much with the same timeline as Maria: two to three months to define what you'll be doing, a month or two to make a selection, and then very quick deployment. The key thing to remember is that you can't really save time by jumping directly to the selection process: you'll just need to do the planning after you've acquired the system. So you might as well do the planning first and have it available to help guide your vendor selection.

I think for an informed marketer who understand demand generation (that is not trade show-based), 1 month of planning of requirements should be enough. Also I'd recommend that planning to happen in isolation of any feature sets that vendors promote as they are most likely to lead you to plan around what is out there, versus what you need. And in most cases what you need is a lot less that what is out there.

For vendor selection, my recommendation is to go with only the vendors who offer a free trial period and have a very defined objective for the trail so you can compare the results and make an informed decision. I would not recommend deciding on a vendor without a trial.

Implementation should be 2 - 10 days and not more unless you are setting up too many customized processes. Also please note that implementation is sort of ongoing as you use more features and design more complex campaigns.

Another thing to consider is not only the "getting started time" but also the time it takes to use the application ongoing. Usability is critical and if you don't feel like you can use the application everyday, then I'd say its a red flag. We have a prospect on trial who is at the end of a yearly subscription with their vendor and had barely used it because he finds it way too complicated and that is after he took the time to go through their online tutorials! So definitely consider this aspect.

Cheers!

When I purchased Marketo prior to working here (I was a customer before I was an employee) I already had good processes in place. I had established lead stages and knew how these leads were moving through the funnel. I purchased marketing automation to help prioritize these leads, to put lead nurturing in place, and to combine services (I no longer need a deduping tool, a website monitoring tool telling me which companies were on my website, and an email tool). I was also purchasing to give my sales team more clarity about marketing programs and website activity. Implementation was as fast as I needed it to be. I had about two weeks to stop using my previous tools and was able to execute my first campaigns as planned. People that preach implementation takes months are either talking about mega integrations with Fortune 500 companies or are speaking of marketers who are doing trade shows or other lead generation activities but have zero process in place for getting them to sales or measuring their success. (Do lots of marketers just spend money with no process in place to make it worth anything to their company outside of brand?)

It took me a few months to purchase a marketing automation system- so not super quick as suggested in the question. I first signed up for all the major vendors newsletters or email lists and viewed the nurturing I received. I used this as the first round of elimination (essentially, if the lead nurturing company wasn't doing lead nurturing I knew it would be too hard for me to do lead nurturing with their system). About 10 months later I took my narrowed list and did demos with the remaining vendors. I had a list of over 200 questions I wanted to ask- and kept track of answers in a spreadsheet. The original post can be found here: http://blog.inboundmarketer.com/2009/02/my-selection-of-a-marketing-automatio... I didn’t just send the list of questions over, but instead took notes during the demos I received. It took me a few weeks to schedule the demos and make the decision.

So in summary, for me it was:
--A few months to decide to purchase a marketing automation system
--2 months to choose between vendors
--About a week to get my emails going and have website monitoring, integration, sales alerts and reporting up and running
--A few more weeks to build out my nurturing and scoring campaigns to something more than basic (including score degradation, lead lifecycle management, etc).

I could have made a snap decision with vendors, but am happy I took the time I did. I was obviously happy with my choice!