B2B Marketing Automation

Defining Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is the systematic programming of your repeatable and tedious marketing tasks.  These often include lead scoring and qualification, email marketing, and reporting.

Who Uses This?

As of June 2010, less than 10% of companies use marketing automation.  Of these, only 25 percent are getting the full value.  In other words, this well publicized technology is still in the early adopter stage of the product lifecycle, and prone to the chasm.

Looking at Moore's Chasm, Marketing Automation is on the edge of the chasm.

Is Marketing Automation Right for Your Company?

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” -Bill Gates

If you are considering a marketing automation tool, you should answer the following questions with respect to your company:

1. Are you looking for a silver bullet? Marketing automation often exposes weaknesses in your content and programs, making the process feel worse before it improves.  Are you able to withstand this scrutiny?
2. Are you willing to stop spamming? Most marketing automation companies apply some version of the permission marketing paradigm in their design: Hubspot focuses on development of useful content for inbound marketing, while Marketo and Eloqua provide the data to create timely, anticipated emails more easily.  But all of this is wasted if you still think branding is sufficient to generate sales.
3. Is your company ready for B2B eCommerce? At the turn of the century, eCommerce marginalized sales teams at B2C firms, as smaller, faster companies gained market share without the overhead of a sales team.  Today, a similar shift is occurring in B2B companies: those with marketing automation software are better able to educate their customers and prioritize prospects, meaning a smaller demand for Sales teams (but a higher demand for the best Sales teams.)
4. Do you want equal footing with Sales? Marketing traditionally fits into the enterprise as a cost center: its accepted as a need, but the lack of insight into the impact prevents it from being seen as valuable as sales.  With a good marketing automation implementation, your team can measure the impact of most programs, leading to a financial justification to add to your budget and influence.
5. Can you accept the level of accountability on par with Sales? The downside to increased visibility into Marketing programs is the increased accountability: if the majority of your programs prove to be ineffective, you will face a new task to optimize this spend.  Are you willing to risk this exposure?

Bottom line:  B2B Marketing Automation is a new tool just gaining traction in the market.  It has a chance to change B2B sales and marketing as much as eCommerce changed B2C sales and marketing.  Its going to expose weaknesses in your company, and will not be an easy process.  But if you don’t implement this technology today, your competitors will turn it on tomorrow and quietly steal market share from you.