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What is a typical implementation duration of a marketing automation solution for a SME?
MA solutions often involve process mapping, role definition, client life cycle analysis, implementation of technology and training. I am primarily interested in the implementation and training duration.
Best Answer
What Sue outlined above is a terrific list. Basically, it's not the marketing automation tool implementation that takes the time - it's your content and figuring out the strategy around it that needs to be pulled together. You can start simply, and then grow what you're doing, but the ABC's still need to be done -- and that's not the technology -- it's the marketing content, knowledge of your customer, etc.
thanks,
Kim
Yes--great answers above.
And the answer to your question really depends on what your final goal is. Are you looking to create a integrated marketing and/or demand generation program? Looking to create a comprehensive web intelligence system or a simple email campaign manager?
Total time to implement also depends on the shape of your current database, whether or not your company uses SalesForce.com, your company's content and design resources, and which engine you ultimately decide to use.
My clients want to build a fully integrated marketing system and demand generation program...and that means they need to the big guns in the MA industry. It takes at least a full year to fully implement those--it just does.
There are two types of marketing automation and which you choose depends on the type of company you are.
B2C MA majors on automation. The company gets so many leads that it has to automate the response. This I regard as similar to the "press 1 for sales" type phone systems - often impersonal but better than dropping the interaction which would occur if left to manual systems. The time span here is in writing a series of buying journeys and mapping customers to them by profile and score.
B2B Marketing Automation majors on Marketing Intelligence. It gives you data on who is talking about you on social media, who is visiting your website and how they arrived there and what they show interest in when they get there - with real insight into prospect intent. It can be set up so that visits from companies you have identified as targets are scored highly, multiple visits are aggregated and it can even narrow the field down to one or two likely contacts, even if they haven't given you name and email. It can gather intelligence on who else they are considering, what their decision making criteria will be and who else is involved. It can then help these buyers through their buying process and nurture them towards closer engagement, integrating with telephone and webinar. Along the way it can qualify them so you have really powerful leads. Best of all, the data it yields allows you to continually improve your processes, evaluate the effectiveness of your lead generation methods, collateral and nurturing so your sales and marketing efforts get better and better over time.
With this you can be gaining benefits from the first day - it links right in to the way you work and gives you intelligence from it. But your results will improve as you find which campaigns work better, how best to judge when a lead is ready for sales interaction and how well collateral etc. is performing. You can also go on and do the automation bit as and when you have proven nurturing processes which work.
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Hi Jacques,
Good question. The actual implementation and training time for most marketing automation tools is quite short these days. Most marketing automation tool (MAT) companies will be able to get you up and running in one to two weeks. Most of the MAT vendors have their portion down to a very methodical process.
A factor that "might" also arise is how much html is required to run the campaigns and how much your have in terms of in-house knowledge. That varies vendor to vendor.
It's really not their end that takes the time, it's the areas you were secondarily interested in - that's what takes the time. If you don't have those pieces in place before you start implementation, then you need to identify and create them now - the rest is fairly straightforward. Most of it has to do with process - identifying, creating and training the marketing and sales teams on the process. Apart from process the areas that you might need to focus on are things like:
1. Identifying your target audience - the implicit and explicit information you need to be able to qualify a lead (this has to be a sales and marketing conversation). Many marketers are creating personas of their target audience/s - so they really understand what motivates, triggers and annoys them. That can take some time but it's a valuable exercise.
2. Definition of a sales qualified lead (SQL) - what are the tick off items that sales needs to know in order to accept a lead as a qualified lead and convert it into an opportunity.
3. Defining your marketing/sales pipeline process - hand offs, send back to nurture, pipeline opportunities, when to send to sales, and the entire process from the MAT to the CRM.
4. Lists - clean up (before putting into the marketing automation tool - particularly if you use one that charges by the number of contacts you have in your database - if you just dump your CRM database in there, you'll be paying for a lot you don't and potentially will never use. Clean up your existing CRM or select specific lists to import); acquisition; and segmentation.
5. Content inventory, creation and mapping - this is the one that most people find slows them down with because they find they don't have enough content to start with. However there are creative solutions around that. This will also help your head get around nurture programs.
6. Tracking and reporting - what do you want to track and report in your MAT and what do you want to track and report in your CRM. Many senior execs only want to look in one place for their reporting, so I find most of the reporting in terms of the pipeline is rolled up into the CRM. You need to identify that, so that when you go to implement your MAT vendor can help you implement something to suit your execs needs.
7. Lead scoring - most of the time if you have an inventory of your content and key web pages and social media tools you can put something together that's fairly rudimentary. That said, most of the MAT vendors will help you develop your first lead scoring program - but they will ask you want you want to score. If you don't have the content inventory, etc. together then it's hard to do.
And again, engage sales where you can because they do provide valuable insights as they speak to the prospects and customers every day. May I also suggest, your first lead scoring, keep it simple, don't over complicate it ... otherwise you could end up in multiple lead scoring hell - where the programs bump into one another. Lead scoring is an iterative process, just start small and grow into it.
Most MAT vendors can get you up and running in a short period of time. It's all about the processes that you create and the elements that need to be in place beforehand in order to take full advantage of the amazing tool that you've invested in. Good luck!
There's more but I know a lot of other people have valuable insights to share as well. It's a start. Hope it helps.
Cheers
Sue