Value in Marketing Automation?

How does this strike you for controversial?  Marketing automation does not generate revenue.  Sure, maybe can help reduce the operational cost of supporting the sales cycle, and maybe it can even help expedite a prospects journey through the funnel.  Still, at the end of the day it does not create revenue.

What has a more direct impact on revenue, however, is greater understanding of customers.  The more I know about who I’m trying to sell to the more effective I can be.  I’ll be able to create more relevant content and be better able to convey how my solution can solve their problems.

When looking at a marketing automation platform this becomes key.  Help me develop a more comprehensive view of my prospect in all the ways I engage them.  Help me break out the content from the channel and focus on what is really moving the needle.  Borrowing from the world of operations, it’s like applying the idea of CPM (critical path methodology) to marketing.  From the moment of the sale let me work back through the sales process to the sequence of interactions that converted.

This is the true power of marketing automation.  Triangulation of the voice of the customer in a digital, social, multi-channel world.  And the ability to map the critical steps in a prospects conversion path.

Why do Sales & Marketing Teams Fail?

The potential of many companies will never be realized because of the inefficiencies and conflict within their sales and marketing organizations. What makes this such a shame is that majority of problems, or at least the major ones are solvable.

At the core, the main challenges can be pegged to two things:

Sales fails as a team

Probably not a lot of argument to this one. Sales is reviled for being cowboys and shirking any “real” work. Can you blame them? More than any other part of the organization, sales is and needs to be performance driven. If a system slows them down or doesn’t help them close deals within the current quarter then they have negative incentive to comply.

For a sales system to work it needs to be built around sales and their need to close business in the current period.

Marketers are bad communicators

This may be a little harder for some people to swallow. On a personal level marketers may be great communicators. The problem, however, is that isn’t being communicated into the field where marketing has lost the voice of the customer. They’ve forgotten how to sell.

When did this happen? Not at one time. As technology over the last century has enabled the marketers’ touch to grow to more and more people it has also moved them further away. It’s become so abstract that clicks and opens are frequently misconstrued as performance.

For marketing to become a more integrated, productive part of the sales process they need to relearn how to sell to customers.