Marketing Automation – Sounds Too Easy

Is “Marketing Automation” an Oxymoron?

I like the term “Marketing Automation” – sounds great…. This is going to automate my world of Internet visibility, demand management, lead generation – fantastic. I will simply plug in a trusty CRM tool like Eloqua or Marketo, hook it into my salesforce.com application… and – like magic – next week, the leads will start to poor in. Right?

I don’t think so….

Marketing Automation is incredible technology. I love it!  However, I see it as only a small part of the overall solution. There are two broad elements of the category according to Wikipedia – demand generation and marketing workflow automation. I think the workflow automation part is pretty nice to have… taking care of repetitive tasks with software tools… But it takes a lot more than technology to get it right. Demand generation also requires a lot more than automation. What are the underlying values of the brand experience? The offer?  Actually, using the software is a very small part of what makes integrated marketing and sales successful. There are a lot of questions to consider.. here are just a few:

• What is the overall strategy- target markets? segments? influencers?
• What are the competitors doing?
• How are customers experiencing the brand?
• How are you positioned across the outposts of the social web?
• How are you organized to deliver?
• What is the lead scoring approach?
• What are the business rules for lead flow? – Inside sales? Outside Sales?
• Is pricing right?
• How are you distributing? partners? channels?
• How effective are your persuasive communications and sales techniques?
• Customer Service?
• Relationship management and learning dialogue?
• Measuring marketing? Sales? What are the incentives?
• What content assets will we use to drive a permission marketing program?
• What is the role of sales, marketing and communications?
• How do we get the web design aligned with the platform technology?
• How do you integrate with sales force automation (another promising term!)?

The list goes on….I think the place to start with a Revenue Architecture… but I am biased of course.