What has been your biggest missed expectation with marketing automation?

Oh, there are so many, Carlos...

1. I expected a much better understanding of the processes MA is trying to automate. Understanding that not only recognises that there are differences between B2C and B2B but within each discipline according to company size, segment and value and sales process for their offering.

2. Even major players who believe there is a linear sales funnel where all leads go through stages in the right order.

3. Corporations who trust that the person who filled out the form for a download is the only person they need to talk to to make the sale.

4. Vendors who pretend that a piece of software will automatically fix a broken sales and marketing process where they don't talk to eachother, argue over the validity of leads and have completely different ways of measuring success.

5. Companies who don't see the value of segmentation and treat leads from a student doing a thesis as of equal value as from a CEO in one of their top 10 Key Prospect Accounts.

I could go on, but you asked for the biggest...

The real value in implementing an MA solution is nearly always in the examination and alignment of the organisation's sales and marketing processes, not in the software itself. So my biggest missed expectation is that major vendors would have clever people helping companies through that process, and that that would be costed into the program implementation.

PS: Carlos is one of the good guys, who does understand processes and how to map them to various MA products. But the VC money behind many vendors has led to short-term, irresponsible marketing by people with little understanding of the possibilities - or of the damage they are doing to whole corporations.