Why do I need Marketing Automation if I already have Salesforce Automation and Email Marketing?

Already have salesforce automation (SFA) and email marketing tools? Marketing automation makes customer data actionable, sales reps more effective, and helps produce a higher ROI from salesforce automation, email marketing, and web analytics tools. Find out how…

JANUARY 2011

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In a world inundated with communication, information is power. Target audiences use 24x7 mobile access to information to make highly informed purchase decisions. Com-petition is greater, customer behavior is more visible, and practically everything we do creates a data point. Marketers use information to try to target buyers with the right products and services. Sales uses information to address buyers needs and desires in an effort to win deals. Customer service uses information to meet and exceed customer expectations. But, the reality is, your company probably doesn’t use information as ef-fectively as it could.

Why? For one thing, there is simply too much data, and it’s impossible to make all of it actionable even with automated technology. But more importantly, most organizational functions still operate in silo. Each function has a specifi c set of tools and technologies to engage, track, and monitor customer and prospect interactions. Sales has salesforce automation tools, customer service has contact-center tools and marketers have a wide variety of different technologies, the most common including email marketing and web analytics. The problem is the holistic information about how customers and prospects interact with different functions (what would otherwise be called the customer experi-ence) is rarely available to marketers, sales reps, and contact center agents when they need it most.

Today, we call the 3 different functional tools for engaging with customers across sales (1), service (2) and marketing (3), Customer Relationship Management (CRM). We man-age customer interactions by tracking, storing, and retrieving information across differ-ent customer experiences. SFA tools are used to manage sales data and interactions, where call-center and customer service tools manage customer and service data. Often SFA and customer service tools are integrated with one another to try to create a holis-tic record of customer interactions over time.

“The problem

is the holistic

information about

how customers and

prospects interact

with different

functions (what

would otherwise be

called the customer

experience) is

rarely available to

marketers, sales

reps, and contact

center agents when

they need it most.”

3

But what about the third pillar under the CRM umbrella—marketing? Where is the tool to manage and act on this data?

Marketing is a bit of a different animal. With so many different new and emerging market-ing channels popping up over the last two decades, solution providers emerged across separate channels. Today, it’s primarily two main channels including email marketing and web analytics, but increasingly it includes emerging channels such as social media and mobile. Tomorrow, it will be another new channel. Enterprise class email marketing and web analytics tools have both matured in adoption and functionality over the past 5 years. By design these tools generate and collect a great deal of customer data; data that is largely stored and created within the confi nes of separate technologies. The concept of CRM is lacking a critical piece of the puzzle. Your marketing data needs a home.

Actually, it goes well beyond the marketing data needing a home. That’s just part of the problem. The real driver behind creating a real 360 degree view of your customers and prospects lies in the ability to actually make marketing, sales, and customer service data actionable. It’s about breaking down the walls that often divide sales and marketing to embrace a common theme: Customers don’t interact with functional silos in the organi-zation. Customers interact with the organization as a whole; the customer experience is the collective interactions between marketing, sales, and service.

Sales and service need insight about how marketers engaged with prospects or cus-tomers. What messages were delivered, when? How did the prospect react? Does their behavior imply anything about their specifi c needs or desires? For sales, this type of information can have a huge impact on sales effectiveness and effi ciency. In fact, it is estimated that a 10% increase in marketing data quality can result in as much as a 40% increase in sales productivity.

What’s Different About Marketing Automation? Today, an emerging class of marketing technology has been developed to fi ll this critical void in CRM datamarts; marketing automation. Marketing automation technologies typi-cally include email marketing, campaign workfl ow, web analytics, content management, a marketing datamart, and robust integration with SFA tools. But, marketing automation solutions are still emerging technologies. Today, they are largely being utilized by early adopter organizations that recognized the value early on. A few common misconcep-tions stunt adoption of marketing automation.

We use salesforce automation to store prospect activity and we have an enter-prise class email marketing tool. Why do we still need marketing automation?

The fi rst question to ask is how deeply your existing salesforce automation and email marketing tools integrate. Many email marketing tools have pre-packaged integration with SFA, but the integration is often at an aggregate level. What is actually needed for both sales and marketing to truly increase effectiveness is deep integration across email, web analytics, social media, tele-sales, and fi eld sales. Even with pre-packaged integra-tion, email marketing tools don’t help sort the needles in the haystack. The goal of mar-keting automation is actually to nurture and engage prospects repeatedly through email, the web, landing pages, and social media channels, so they actually desire to take things further with a sales rep. As such, marketing automation solutions deliver fewer leads to sales, but the leads that do make it to sales have a much higher propensity to close.

“Customers don’t

interact with

functional silos in

the organization.

Customers interact

with the organization

as a whole; the

customer experience

is the collective

interactions between

marketing, sales, and

service.”

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Marketing automation tools have built in workfl ow triggers and deep integration with salesforce automation tools so prospects can be handed off to sales at just the right time. Marketing automation provides a rich profi le of prospect activity and behavior by con-tact record, as well as the means to act upon key buying signals. Marketing automation makes email behavioral data actionable. Separate email and web analytics technologies just don’t cut it when it comes to making the data actionable for marketing and sales.

This is where marketing automation shines. It allows marketing, and specifi cally the marketing technology, to automate the heavy lifting part on the front-end of the funnel so that sales works only leads that are truly qualifi ed; and probably more importantly, marketing automation tools provide all of the relevant marketing history to the sales reps at their fi ngertips so that when they do engage with the prospect, chances for clo-sure are that might higher.

We have an enterprise class web analytics tool. It seems like the web analytics capabilities in marketing automation tools are redundant?

Actually, marketing automation tools don’t replace web analytics, they use some of the same basic techniques to provide a completely different set of tools for sales and mar-keting. Market leading web analytics tools are powerhouse data aggregators. In fact, the biggest challenge for organizations that leverage web analytics tools is fi guring out which data is actually relevant and how to make the data actionable. But how much of the data in those enterprise class web analytics tools makes it in front of marketing or sales on a regular basis? For most organizations, the answer is none.

Web analytics capabilities in marketing automation tools are designed for a different purpose. Marketing automation includes pre-built deep integration with email market-ing capabilities so click-throughs on email can be tracked and monitored. Likewise, prospect and customer activity on the site is pumped through marketing automation triggers and scoring techniques to literally prioritize which leads are hot and which are not. Marketing automation can automatically alert sales reps about key account activity or trigger an email campaign based on a customer behavior threshold. Marketing au-tomation makes web analytics data actionable. And again as above, the reps are more knowledgeable when they do decide it’s time to engage with a prospect.

Marketing Tools are Evolving Faster than Organizations can AdaptMarketing is, by nature, complex. Customers demand relevant communications across a growing plethora of different channels. Unfortunately, this usually means marketers are trying to catch up with target audiences. Take social media for example. Millions of consumers and target buyers interact on social media every minute, yet social media strategy is still nascent in most organizations. Research from Forrester and Marketing-Profs , “B2B Marketing Budgets And Tactics Online Survey”, asked marketers to rank the top three challenges they expected to face in 2010. The top three answers, in rank order included “generating more leads”, “reaching decision-makers”, and “improving lead quality”. The challenges haven’t changed, but the skills and avenues for delivering these challenges is more complex than ever. Marketers are overwhelmed.

Marketing automation technologies are one-stop shops for engaging customers in cross-channel interactions. With separate tools, marketers are constrained by channels and resources. True cross-channel marketing engages customers across multiple chan-nels in one campaign and then tracks and monitors customer activity for channel pref-erence and buying behavior. Today, marketers are still overwhelmed by the complexity of multiple solutions. The fact is, it’s just not possible to manually engage customers at just the right time, in just the right medium.

“The customer

experience is

the collective

interactions between

marketing, sales, and

customer service.

Sales has salesforce

automation.

Customer Service has

call-center solutions.

Marketing has…a

half-dozen different

technologies? Your

marketing data needs

a home, or it’s not

really actionable.”

5

Marketing automation tools mitigate these challenges allowing marketers to send more campaigns in shorter periods of time to relevant audiences.

Yet adoption is slow. Gartner estimates that by 2013, 70% of lead management campaigns will leverage only one or two tightly integrated channels, which is down from 95% in 20101. Industry leaders that are able to tightly integrate four or more digital channels to drive lead management processes will outperform single or dual-channel lead manage-ment campaigns by 300%. But today, marketing automation initiatives have largely been pushed aside while marketers struggle with the chaos of multiple solutions. Utilizing three or more channels in a single campaign is nearly impossible without a marketing automa-tion technology, and yet, that’s where forward thinking competitors are investing.

A recent survey from Velocity Partners asked B2B marketers what they found to be “the hardest part of B2B marketing.” One overwhelming answer took center stage “convinc-ing internal resources”. What’s lacking is confi dence. Three years ago, marketing au-tomation tools heavily targeted marketers around the benefi ts of these technologies. But this messaging largely fell on def ears. Today, you’ll see marketing automation-like vendors target sales with the same technologies and snazzy new catch phrases like “revenue performance management platforms”.

The truth is, marketing automation is ABSOLUTELY valuable to sales.

But, marketers need to wake up. For years, marketers have been held accountable for tangible business results. These are very diffi cult to measure and quantify when sepa-rate marketing technologies are in the mix. Marketing automation provides an integrat-ed home for marketing data. A place where all email sequences, registrations, website visits, downloads, social interactions, and phone conversations can be centralized in chronological order. Marketing automation provides a window into prospect activity and the tools to more effectively touch prospects with relevant, timely engagement with every interaction. And, it makes sales people more effective and effi cient, thus fi nally helping marketing and sales departments align.

A Day in the Life of Sales and Marketing Teams Before and After Marketing AutomationThe following two case studies demonstrate how sales and marketing will benefi t from marketing automation, even if the organization has already invested in separate sales-force automation, email marketing, and web analytic tools. These are REAL examples, but we changed the company names to protect identities.

These are just two of many challenges that can arise from a lack of integration across marketing and sales. Each example is followed by an explanation of how marketing auto-mation can mitigate these challenges for measurable increases in sales close rates, sales productivity, marketing effectiveness, and revenue growth. If your organization is experi-encing any of the same challenges, the benefi ts you could realize from marketing automa-tion may be just the right catalyst to sell the initiative internally and justify the investment.

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A Day in Life Example #1: LearnQuick SoftwareLearnQuick Software – Marketing and Sales Before Marketing Automation

LearnQuick Software sells on-demand learning management technology. The sales cycle is complex and on average lasts 6-9 months. Marketing has developed a fairly robust set of online resources (whitepapers, blog posts, etc.) for prospects to learn about the technology. The marketing department regularly sends out email campaigns inviting prospects to attend webinars or download whitepapers. Marketers have access to an enterprise class web analytics solution which they check periodically to see which con-tent is being downloaded the most and the average number of page views per website visit. This data resides exclusively in the web analytics tool and only a handful of mar-keters have access to view it.

Mike Smith is a sales rep at LearnQuick where each week he receives a list of 100-200 potential prospects from marketing that he is assigned to call. On occasion, marketing will annotate the source of the lead by manually pulling reports from the email tool or web analytics tool separately. This is arduous and time consuming for marketing to say the least, so often not done at all, and your reps have little if any information about the prospects besides their contact information. Sound familiar?

If LearnQuick’s SFA and email marketing tools are integrated, there is a chance that Mike might know which email campaigns the prospects received, but he would not have any click through or conversion behavior. And to get the campaign data, he would have to go manually into the tool to look for it. Again, sound familiar?

Each week Mike dials for dollars, engaging each prospect by phone. Mike spends 80% of his time trying to articulate the value of the LearnQuick to the people he calls. On oc-casion he engages with someone who is actually interested in a demo, he enters these leads into the SFA system as opportunities and starts the next week with a new list.

LearnQuick Software, Inc. – Marketing And Sales After Marketing Automation

Email campaigns from the marketing department are dialog based, meaning follow-up emails are automatically delivered based on whether or not a prospect opens an email, and the links they click in the email. Marketers also share email campaigns across social media channels and track click-through to the website or landing pages from these channels. Marketing and sales developed a list of buying behavior triggers which mar-keting used to create lead scoring profi les. These profi les automatically assign numeric scores to key prospect activities. For example, prospects receive points for fi lling out landing pages or registration forms, higher points are given to individuals who indicate they are “Vice Presidents” and have budget for solutions like LearnQuick. Other points are assigned for web pages they visit, or an online survey they may respond to. Over time, the aggregation of points helps marketing identify the hot prospects for sales and automatically alerts are sent to Sales to contact these prospects.

Mike no longer receives lists of leads from marketing. In the morning, Mike logs into SFA and receives a list of 5-10 leads that are prioritized by a numerical score. Higher scoring individuals are hot prospects and have engaged with the LearnQuick website, registration forms, and email on multiple occasions. These individuals are well educated about the benefi ts LearnQuick has to offer. Integration allows Mike to drill down on these prospects and see a chronological view of all marketing activity over the past few months includ-ing campaigns received, clicked links, downloads, webinar registrations, events attended, etc.. Mike can see that one of his prospects received an email and clicked through to register for a webinar on a brand new feature LearnQuick is developing. Mike uses this in-

Company: LearnQuick Software

Current Technologies: SFA, Email Marketing So-lution, and Web Analytics Solution

Company: LearnQuick Software

Current Technologies: SFA, Email Marketing Solution, Web Analytics Solution, and Marketing Automation

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formation to have a highly relevant and engaging phone conversation with the prospect. Mike enters this into SFA with notes, and the conversation becomes part of the prospect’s contact history. Mike is far more productive after marketing automation and can focus his effort calling only those prospects that are qualifi ed, and has a higher chance of success given all of the background information he has to prepare for the call.

A Day in Life Example #2: ExcellentEvents, Inc.ExcellentEvents – Marketing And Sales Before Marketing Automation

ExcellentEvents is a tradeshow and events management company working on organiz-ing a large technology tradeshow. ACME Widgets is sponsoring this year’s event and was one of the fi rst sponsors to sign with a full-price Platinum sponsorship costing $100,000. The marketing department from ExcellentEvents manages all email marketing communications and there is integration between their SFA and email marketing tools, but it is an out-of-the box type of confi guration, so it is not very deep in terms of sharing relevant data. And, they do not utilize a marketing automation tool. A few weeks before the sponsorship deadline, the marketing department from ExcellentEvents still has to fi ll two more sponsorship slots. The marketing department launches a tele-marketing campaign to personally reach out and call prospect vendors for a special opportunity to sponsor. Joe, a tele-sales rep from ExcellentEvents, calls ACME Widgets, unaware that ACME Widgets is already a sponsor, and offers a 50% discount on a Platinum sponsor-ship. Sound familiar?

ExcellentEvents – Marketing And Sales After Marketing Automation

ExcellentEvents is desperate for two more sponsorships to fulfi ll their contract. The marketing department uses the marketing automation tool to run a segmented list. They exclude all current sponsors, and vendors who have been fl agged as “confi rmed no to sponsorship”. The list is shared with the Joe, the Sales Rep, either electronically by fl ag-ging them in the SFA, or by emailing the list or printing it out. Joe can do last minute outreach without worrying about calling existing sponsors.

An email marketing campaign is set up with the remaining opportunities; suppression rules ensure no current sponsors receive the email campaign. The campaign is person-alized with information about last year’s event. Recipients receive an email reminding that they were a sponsor last year and the exact level they sponsored at (which is dy-namically updated based on the prospects record). Recipients are encouraged to reach

-------------- ---- --- --

-------------- ---- --- --

Marketing and sales create lead scoring profi les that rank prospects per given criteria.

Prioritized leads are automatically sent to sales for

engagement.

Sales leverages contact and conversation history on each prospect to increase success.

Company: ExcellentEvents

Current Technologies: SFA, Contact Center, Email Marketing Solution, and Web Analytics Solution

Company: ExcellentEvents

Current Technologies: SFA, Contact Center, Email Marketing Solution, Web Analytics Solution, and Marketing Automation

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out to ExcellentEvents for “special consideration on last minute sponsorship for the upcoming event”. The use of personalization results in 10x the click through rate over generic email campaigns. ExcellentEvents signs 2 more sponsorships and representa-tives from both companies indicated they were new to their role and didn’t realize their companies had sponsored last year. And, equally as important, ExcellentEvents did not upset their existing full paying platinum sponsor, ACME Widgets.

The Relationship between Marketing Automation and Sales EffectivenessFor many companies, their salesforce automation tool has become the central point of record for customer data in many organizations. But, integration between salesforce au-tomation and marketing technologies is still signifi cantly lacking. The truth is, salesforce automation mostly contains only sales data; opportunities, sales contacts, bookings, and forecast targets. Sales people are missing visibility into a critical piece of the customer experience; marketing. In most cases, prospects have been inundated with market-ing campaigns and programs long before they started talking to sales. If salespeople do not have access to this information, they essentially have to start the conversation over again with the prospect. To be effective, marketing automation must integrate tightly with the salesforce automation tool, email marketing, and web analytics to not only prioritize leads, but provide a window into the prospect’s intentions before the fi rst meeting with sales. Marketing automation enables sales teams to do what they do best – SELL; marketing automation makes sales teams not only more effi cient as they are only calling qualifi ed leads, but also increases sales effectiveness because sales efforts are resultantly more personalized and relevant through the use marketing automation.

About NeolaneNeolane provides the only conversational marketing technology that empowers orga-nizations to build and sustain one-to-one lifetime dialogues, dramatically increasing revenue and marketing effi ciency. Born digital, with best-in-class email and inbound-outbound channel fusion capabilities architected into a single code-based platform, mar-keters achieve results in record time. Neolane is easy to use for both power and casual users, but powerful enough to drive the most sophisticated marketing strategies. Future proof, Neolane has a track record of enabling its customers to adapt to new customer engagement challenges and exploit opportunities more quickly than their competition. Neolane is used by more than 250 of the world’s leading companies including Sony Music, Alcatel-Lucent, Orange, Sears Canada, and Sephora. Visit www.neolane.com and read our blog The Cross-Channel Conversation.

1 Gartner, “Twenty-Two CRM Marketing Insights to Consider for the CMO Dashboard”, 2010, Chris Fletcher

Email campaign is created with appropriate suppression

rules in place.

Recipients receive email customized with data from

their profi les.

Click through rate of personalized email is 10x that of a generic email campaign.

10x

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