When is the right time to implement a marketing automation solution?

Clint you might want to give York Baur at TAS Group a call. Not only do they implement sales performance (and ultimately shouldn't marketing automation result in increased sales performance?) solutions but they recently deployed a marketing automation solution to help with their efforts.

Last week I was on the phone with him and he shared a lot of insight with me about the process he went through: 1) deciding when the time was right to move to marketing automation and 2) deciding which solution was right for him. (FYI, he's on vacation this week but I can hook you up.)

For York he knew that it was time to step up to marketing automation because his email provider wasn't delivering the information required to meet TAS' demand gen and sales targets. I know that ease of use and real-time feedback was critical to his decision on which marketing automation provider to use.

I'm at ptrewin@genius.com, if you'd like me to make a connection with York and the TAS Group.

I've implemented a very successful marketing automation program and the one thing I've learned is that there are a whole slew of reason that will impact your timing for implementation - each one unique to the company.

The reason for my implementation was that we needed to get more efficient in how we managed our leads. Our marketing $$ were being cut, so we needed to figure out how to increase conversion of the leads that we were generating through our healthy programs.

My success metrics were:
1) Steady out the lead flow for my sales team - our big batch marketing efforts were creating big spikes and valleys in the lead flow to the sales organization, making it difficult for them to follow up with the truly qualified prospects
2) Qualify leads prior to sending to sales - we needed to free up our agents to focus on selling, rather than lead qualification. So, we chose a solution that would allow us to "score" our prospects and send over only those who were showing active online shopping behavior (most qualified).
3) Decrease latency in lead follow-up - leads would sit around for up to two months before our next marketing communication would push... this was a bad customer experience and was hurting the overall growth of the business
4) Improve conversion of leads generated through existing demand gen programs.

End results, our lead flow is now coming in a nice steady stream, our prospects are now receiving relevant and real time communications from our organization, marketing spend is down, agents are better able to prioritize their pipeline and conversions are ticking up.

Hope that helps... please feel free to contact me via LinkedIn if you'd like more information.

Best of Luck!
Laura Guntren, Marketing Manager
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lguntren

Hey Clint, I know I sent this response to you in Linkedin the other day, but thought I would post it here too. My previous response:

Well, here is one of those Marketing Automation companies chiming in again. Though I'm doing so because we can really help. And because I've made this decision myself before working for a marketing automation company.

Deciding shouldn’t be done based on feelings- it should be determined based on the return you will achieve for your company. Calculate out what you expect the return to be, and then see if that is more money than the marketing automation service will cost. If so, it’s time to buy. If not, don’t invest in a marketing automation system yet.

Lead nurturing has proven to increase the value of leads in your database by 25%. So, look at your conversion rate of leads older than 30 days. See what the value would be if you could get 25% more of these leads to convert to opportunities. (For a detailed example of how to calculate this visit http://www.marketo.com/dg2-lead-nurturing)

Lead scoring should help you identify the leads your reps should be paying attention to. A 10% improvement in lead quality can result in a 40% improvement in sales productivity. Can lead scoring help you improve the quality of leads you are sending to sales? If so, calculate out the return.

The average conversion rate when companies used their homepage as the destination for an advertisement or link is 6 percent. However, companies that use targeted landing pages have almost double the conversion rate, with 12 percent of their visitors converting. What will the benefits be if you can easily create multiple versions of landing pages and emails, plus have the ability to test them in the same system?

Now, look at the cost of your marketing automation tool. Marketo has our pricing on our website- so this can help you estimate: http://www.marketo.com/pricing. Now subtract what you are currently spending on email marketing, deduping, website monitoring, landing page and/or lead scoring tools as you should no longer need these tools.

Is this more than the total of the estimated ROI of lead nurturing, lead scoring and landing page optimization you did above? If so, wait. If not, consider purchasing a marketing automation tool.

PS. The actual timing – to decide if you should buy this month or next month should also consider the processes you have in place, the resources you have in your group, and other objectives of your team (opportunity costs).

Hopefully this is similar to the answers our competitors gave. We typically agree on this- as having customers that see no financial benefit in the product doesn’t help any of us. It’s much better to have customers who know where they are when they are getting started and then can see a financial impact of the system they integrate.

Also, Marketo customer Emily Salus did an article about this in MarketingProfs- you can find the information here:

Part 1: When to Adopt Lead Scoring, and How to Justify the Investment: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31567

Part 2: 8 Criteria for Choosing a Lead Scoring/Marketing Automation Vendor: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31571

Emily is as smart as they come- we are lucky to be able to learn from her at Marketo. We're happy she shares her ideas, allowing others to achieve success with her.

From a vendor point of view, I think its important to clarify nomenclature. Marketing Automation is developing a repeatable business process to manage your marketing funnel and deliver qualified leads to sales through ongoing lead nurturing. Campaign automation is a layer down on the stack - implementing multiple touches to further develop leads in a one off marketing campaign.

When do you need marketing automation? This certainly depends on the business, but in my estimation, when companies begin spending $500k-$600k in revenue there is a paradigm shift. They have enough leads entering the top of the funnel, but a majority of them fall by the wayside. Implementing a marketing automation solution will continue the dialog with these leads, leading to an increased flow of leads to sales from your existing database.

Hope this helps,
Christopher Doran
Vice president, marketing
Manticore Technology

Jeff and Maria, your points in particular resonated here. It's important for any marketing automation solution to make sense cost wise. Common sense maybe, but actually doing some homework on expected ROI will definitely pay off. We've also found with our customers that you absolutely have to change the marketing status quo and do the work Lee is talking about to really be successful.

Chris
www.treehousei.com

Implement marketing automation when you have pain around lead gen (as in not enough leads) or lead qualification (as in you can't manually qualify the leads you have). But there's no "right" time. It's something every sophisticated marketing should do, and you need to prepare yourself and your organization for the transformation.

After you have established a genuine SALES PROCESS. In my years of working with a variety of firms, I have found that many executives consider sales to be a matter of some "mystery" and undefinable "mojo" that cannot actually be "managed." The give great latitude to these workers of mystery and are loathe to impose upon them anything like a real PROCESS.

If it is NOT a process, it cannot be managed. It is that simple. Even if you do have a CRM with "steps" prescribed, if these are not actually executed in a uniform way, one is not witnessing "a process." It's still "mojo."

I'd suggest reading REENGINEERING THE SALES PROCESS by Justin Roff-Marsh before you decide to automate what may not be a process at all.

...

Clint:

I am inclined to agree with Malcolm on there being no "right time". However, I would tell you that do not proceed with marketing automation until you have taken the time to develop and implement a lead management process.

To many companies have looked to their marketing automation solution to supply lead management but come up short and then understand that lead management is a process, not a solution. Make sure you put the process first, then go with the technology that will enable it.

Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group

A great question and you have received some good answers. In fact the only one I disagree with is ironically contained in the "best" answer. The Greenfield is not always the best time to implement an Inbound Marketing Automation (IMA) solution. Why? Because when you have a new website with low page rank and authority, you will find it difficult to attract people to your site via SEO. Not saying that you can't use IMA when you're new, or that you can't compensate for the poor SEO performance which comes with being in the "sandbox" by using Social Media Marketing (SMM) or PPC. But just be aware that older and more established players will get more traffic at first.
And now to more specifically answer your question, I would say that until you have done the following, implementing any form of Automation is simply a faster and more expensive way to not reach your goals:
1) Create a solid marketing strategy which covers your online brand identity (your chosen keywords), as well as the more traditional areas (the five Ps, your target markets, the right product/service - etc.)
2) Renovate or redo your website to take advantage of your marketing strategy. Make sure all the on page SEO is done correctly so that you maximize your Search Engine Results Page Rankings (SERPs). The most important element here is actually inbound links and we'll get to that in a moment.
3) Design and create your Content around the same strategy, but remember to create pieces of content which are aimed specifically at your prospect's "buying-cycle". Engaging your visitors with content which is tempting enough to make them willing to give up their names and email addresses is the first step. Having suitable content to use in your automated drip emails is another different step. You must have both types of content to make IMA work.
4) Begin implementing your SMM strategy - writing blogs, commenting on others, attending forums, etc. This piece of advice, by the way, should be taken within the context of using the right process to run your SMM campaigns and that process does involve a lot of listening before you join in with your own voice. And forge as many links from other sites to your own site by leaving them, when appropriate, as part of your comments. Never use black hat techniques to get links - you will end up being black-listed for doing so.
5) And now that you have a proper marketing strategy in place and your website is operating well within the parameters you set for it, you should now turn your attention to the internal processes in your company to ensure that they are designed with your people in mind AND the new approaches which your automation will bring. It's a little chicken & Eggish, in that you do need to know something about the way the automation is going to work to do this effectively, so you should get some help from an expert, or you should pick the automation suite you're going to use and study it, learn how it works in theory, and match its capabilities to your objectives. And along the way, carefully design the ways in which your people are going to interact with the new tools. Implementing the solution in this way gives you the perfect opportunity to integrate your sales and marketing teams - you can use the shared database to bring them closer, and you can you use your new processes to help them work more closely together too.
6) And now you can install an IMA system. Once you have picked the right one, that is: one that fits your budget, but also one that gives you all the features you need to make the newly designed process work well. When you have done this, go back and revisit your process design to make sure its operating as efficiently as possible.

We try to design in the Continuous Process Improvement mantra to the systems we design for our clients: Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat. If you do this properly, you will set yourself off along the path of getting better and better at attracting visitors to your site, engaging them, qualifying, scoring and nurturing them and then converting them.

If you would like more on the above steps, or to read some of the detailed Process Descriptions of which I speak here, please visit our website at www.inbound-marketing-automation. You'll find videos, white papers, an extensive glossary, and a slew of blog-posts covering this all in detail.