What features justify a marketing automation purchase?

Hi Caty,

Very good question. Marketing Automation solutions like eTrigue offer much more than an email blast tool. Off the top of my head, here are the most often cited reasons to switch from a blast tool.

1. Website Tracking is number one. Knowing who is on your site and storing that information is as essential as knowing who walks into the lobby of your company.

2. Real-time email lead alerts to sales. Letting sales know when a customer or prospective customer is on your site will increase contact rates by up to 10X. Qualification rates also go up dramatically by engaging when your company is top of mind.

3. With page visit tracking you can begin to segment your audience based on behavior. This will improve marketing effectiveness and accelerate the sales process as you are sending information based on prospect interest.

4. Automation will allow you to effectively nurture prospects depending on who, what and when the engage with your company. Automatically triggering emails or other interactions is key to making sure you don’t let prospects slip through the cracks.

5. Scoring allows you to measure the readiness of your prospects. Using demographic and activity information you can identify who’s active, real, and ready to buy.

Hope this helps… jim.meyer@etriguecorp.com

Marketing automation for B2B is typically cost justified in several ways
1. Replacement of existing systems with a single system - most companies who purchase marketing automation are using a combination of technologies such as email (constant contact...vertical response...et al) and web lead tracking solutions such as lead lander. The cost of a single marketing automation will likely be more than the sum of the existing point solutions but efficiencies will be gained and the cost increase minimized somewhat.
2. Opportunity cost - if I can run 1 campaign per month w/out a marketing automation solution and i average 10 qualified leads per campaign and of those 10 qualified leads on average, 1 converts to a sale in the amount of $X dollars, then the rationale goes...with marketing automation I can do 5 campaigns per month - which should result in 50 leads converting to 5 sales. A good ROI model needs to look at lead conversion rates relative to opportunities in CRM. There will likely be no integration between so this will be an exercise in data gathering and analysis. Linking leads to opportunities and then factoring an increase in campaigns/leads - ultimately leading to more oppts should be the baseline approach to this.
So from a features standpoint, marketing automation should be able to
1. Eliminate need for multiple systems
2. Enable user to execute more campaigns for equal or less cost - aka - campaign automation, drip marketing, trigger marketing
3. Track/manage ROI through to the opportunity in CRM

Note - if you can't do more campaigns with marketing automation - you're not ready to buy one. Also - you have to factor in the ramp up time. Some solutions (not mine of course :-) ) have a steep learning curve which can be 90-120 days. Some of the more complex systems, like big CRM systems, have features that the average Joe will never use. Make sure that before purchasing a system, you have campaigns in the hopper ready to execute. This will make for a better/faster ROI.
Learn more about my company's marketing automation solution at www.salesfusion.com

All great points on features to expect and things to look for from the folks above. I would definitely agree. As Kevin mentioned, you have to also look at how quickly you can get to value. This means much more than just "turning on" the system - success is about *using* the capabilities to improve your business.

Look for a good methodology to get the hard sales/marketing business decisions (how is a lead defined?, what gets passed to sales?, how is a lead nurtured?, what data is needed?, etc) made (by your own internal team, but with expertise and guidance). We (I'm with Eloqua) use an intensive program called SmartStart to guide all of these decisions and get to value within 5 days ( http://www.eloqua.com/services/getting_started/ ). Without that, if you're just being handed a piece of technology (regardless how simple it seems), you will likely stumble.

As for features, the list above is solid. I would add that the one area that is most often overlooked in a marketing automation system is the ability to manage data. It's not exciting, but if your data is not standard and clean (ie, you have "V.P. Marketing", "Vice Pres Mktg", "VP Marketing" etc as the same title), you won't be able to (a) build a segment, (b) personalize content, (c) score leads, or (d) analyze your success.

I wrote a bit more about data management and marketing automation here:
http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2010/01/foundation-for-great-marketin...

While the other features are the ones that are most often talked about, the ability to keep data in good order is a feature that really separates success from failure.

This is going to be very individual to the purchaser.

When I was purchasing a marketing automation product for my company I knew I was going to be able to replace tools I was already using: 1. my email tool, 2. my CRM deduplication tool 3. and my website monitoring tool.

I knew that regardless of the training I received I would still need some time to customize my lead scoring and start putting my lead nurturing campaigns in order. I didn't want to be forced into a one-time training or need to pay for additional as I knew I would implement in stages.

I also knew that I didn't need some features- like a built-in CMS or the ability to send texts to my prospects (because I worked for a B2B company.)

Finally, as one of the few marketers that is a Certified Administrator in Salesforce.com, I was able to look critically at the way the marketing automation tools available integrated with my CRM. I wanted my sales team to see what I was doing in marketing, and to be able to react appropriately. I didn't want to spend time having to map fields to my marketing automation tool everytime someone made a change to my CRM system or to have to manually send information from my CRM to my marketing automation tool.

In the end I was able to select a product that was just a little more $ than the tools I was using just to do email/dedudlication/website monitoring, and have one integrated system that could now do lead scoring, lead nurturing, data cleanup, and more.

For those I talk with looking at marketing automation I suggest making a list of your requirements and estimating out the benefits of each if implemented properly. This will help you determine your budget. Talk to other companies who are in similar industries who have also recently purchased and find out why they chose the way they did.

PS- Since my purchase I joined Marketo (the same company I chose when I bought marketing automation) to share some of my best practices with other marketers. Feel free to reach out anytime - maria@marketo.com

In my opinion it’s how much time will it save and what improvements will it offer. Time for revenue generating activities is the most important benefit I look for. If I can automate something using software so that a person has more time to do more productive tasks then the ROI becomes an easy calculation. At the same time I look for additional benefits like increased volumes that can be completed quicker by automating or better data can be generated faster or more information that can be provided because it’s not being done by hand.

We use tools that automatically mine the Internet in real time to capture the most up to date dynamic and comprehensive business contact data available. This produces better as well as more data than we were able to find through traditional activities but also because the tools do it automatically it provides all the time sales or marketing was spending looking for that data back to them to do more activities that directly generate revenue. The tools also send the data right to our CRM so we don't have to waste time copy and pasting to get it there.

It was easy to directly relate the increase in sales, time saving and better leads to our ROI.

Cathy,

Features that justify marketing automation include (a) time and cost savings, (b) operational consistency, and (c) leverage of existing resources.

Marketing automation isn't just software automation, but should include reducing back-end office costs -- for example, my campaign management company makes sure landing pages are in place and tested, that a mailing houses drop campaign to coordinate with a social media campaign, and that response packages are sent to inquiries quickly. This frees up sales staff to handle follow up calls and presentations.

More than 80% of the marketing you should be doing requires manual support. Often support that isn't always needed in-house, or only desirable on a per campaign basis. While most marketing automation software will tell you when something needs sent, you still might be tying up higher dollar labor in the process.

Sincerely,

Justin Hitt
Sales Marketing Advisor
http://HittPublishingDirect.com/

In many ways, marketing automation is the easiest app to justify. It enables you to do lead nurturing, score leads to maximize the use of salesperson's time, track digital body language, create landing pages, and much more.

However, marketers need to really think long and hard. Marketing automation is a power tool, but a power tool does not make you an architect.

You need great content. You need not do it all in house, but you can use other content (with permission). You can map out stories and content based on the customer personas and buying processes. You can tell stories and build all types of content with cliff hangers -- teasing the reader what they will get next time.

Every B2B seller should invest in marketing automation as part of their lead generation strategy.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

I can tell you what helped make the decision for us (and the CMO) in a previous (F500) company, in order of importance:

1. Need for closed loop metrics to consistently measure ROMI globally and help make marketing mix/investment decisions

2. Need to improve marketing database hygiene

3. Need for more pervasive and consistent enurturing campaigns

Scoring. Scoring and Scoring. Many organizations have latched on to the email and nurturing side of Marketing Automation. However, we see very few who are effectively evaluating and RE-evaluating their scoring models while accurately weighing multi-touch campaigns. Most talk score when implementing but never revisit the success of the scoring metrics.

We revisit scoring metrics on a monthly basis with our clients to ensure a "qualified" lead is just that. We put together a jumping off paper on this a while back: http://lead.maasimpact.com/LeadScoring101.html

Above all others, nurturing is the functionality that justifies an investment in marketing automation. Any sales person will tell you that lead quality is their single biggest gripe. Nurturing is essential to educating leads about your product/service and this empowers the marketer to deliver prospects that are more likely to turn into customers. There are plenty of statistics to support this (SiriusDecisions, MarketingProfs, etc) and plenty of anecdotal input (go ask a sales person at a company that uses automation).

As for cost/ROI balance, the pricing is very competitive with not a lot of disparity. My advice is do two rounds of demos and don't believe the sales hype about it being easy to use. It's not rocket science but enterprise software is never easy.

Best of luck! Malcolm