Whether you are just starting your marketing automation journey or you’re ramping up to crush next quarter’s goals, there are some solid tips and tricks to achieve marketing automation success. I’ve worked in marketing automation for a number of years, and while success requires a lot of moving parts, these tips will help you get there.
Ensure Alignment with Sales and Other Departments
The best project outcomes I have seen are when the project lead is embedded within Marketing and works at the intersection of Marketing, Sales, and Technology. This ensures alignment across disciplines.
Sales and Marketing will be on board quickly, so start there. Billing teams are system critical to the business and will need reassurance and careful work to bring them into marketing automation.
A Phased Approach with a Vision Works Best
Marketing automation is powerful and can touch many functions. Take a phased approach.
- Know all the systems.
- Which systems and teams need this now?
- Which can use it later?
- What is the impact?
When I first implemented Marketo, I often found myself a bit out of step with the rest of the firm. And by out of step, I mean I was way ahead because I had fully embraced revenue marketing and the rest of the firm was not quite ready. So I stepped back and courted each group with what was in it for them whenever possible.
- Sales – better leads, better information on what they need, and they are closer to buying…at least that was the vision.
- Marketing – I will automate all of the drudgery and liberate you to run real programs and nurturing. You will look awesome.
- IT – please just setup the CNAME 🙂
- Web Technology – we’d like to track lead behavior and setup our own forms so we don’t bug you anymore. We won’t interfere with things like Omniture and Google Analytics – we promise!
- SFDC Admins – we need your help with integration and we’ll help you increase usage.
Get Buy In From Sales, then Technology
Obtaining buy-in from each group and each team leader is key to your early success. Buy-in is crucial from the heads of Sales, Marketing, and Technology.
As you can see above, you do need to consider where each team is coming from, what they need, and what their goals might be. I’d like to think the CEO would help align us all, but the reality is each team has specific goals that aren’t obviously linked to your marketing automation project. Help other team leaders make the leap to understand why this is important and why this might even help them reach their goals:
- Sales – make more calls and calls that lead to Opportunities and Won Sales each month.
- Marketing – save time and focus on content, testing, and nurturing.
- Web/Tech – marketing will be able to handle more requests without you. More lead tracking will enhance existing analytics tools. Be careful that you don’t steal their thunder.
- Product Management – easier to send out surveys, use tracking data on site and in product. Even trigger in product emails to increase usage.
- Operations and Finance – (usually last on my list) – automate invoices and notices.
Include the Client Facing Teams and the Customer
A successful roll out needs to include the customer lifecycle and which teams own each stage of that lifecycle. For example:
- Stage 1: Web, Marketing Communications
- Stage 2: Demand Generation, Content, and Sales
- Stage 3: Customer Onboarding
- Stage 4: Account Management and Billing
Remember that your goal is to help the customer do something they believe is critical enough to pay you for. If you just automate emails, you become a spammer. Whenever you design a workflow, form, or page design it with the customer in mind. You are there to help them and any way you can remove barriers for a lead, you both win.
This is why MAP features like progressive profiling and data appending are crucial to the customer experience. If you can make it easier for the lead to fill out less information, or already know who they are, then you saved someone a few seconds. A few seconds over tens of thousands of leads saves a lot of hours of work. Those seconds also take the hesitation out of providing contact information in exchange for content.
Include your CRM Admin
Remember to work with your CRM Admin (if you have one) to map out existing fields, field values, and any new fields required. A few key questions should help the conversation.
- What do you need to track?
- Who is responsible for what?
- Which reports do you want the system to spit out?
Then work backward to determine what else you need in the system.
Let Leads be Themselves
Consider having a free text ‘Job Title’ field where leads provide their real title – the one that makes them feel good. Then ask for a ‘Role’ or ‘Seniority’ field which is your main segmentation bucket. If you really want to take the burden off the lead, run data management flows to map this data automatically. You can use tools like RingLead, Demandbase, and ReachForce.
Clean Your Data Automatically
Dedupe and clean up your CRM before you connect your marketing automation system. Be sure to have the CRM enforce data quality through dupeblockers, ISO Country Picklists, and required fields.
Then make a list of key data that can be managed automatically or standardized to avoid re-work. Common candidates for this treatment are:
- Country and State: best to define CRM picklists and Form picklists, but you can automate fixes too.
- Lead Source: revise your picklist and make sure your Forms are stamping leads properly. If you have to, data flows can monitor and update bad values.
- Subscription Management: design a compliant system and automatically update lists to have accurate counts for easy sending.
- Competitors – screen and block competitors.
Aim Toward the Vision, Get Big Wins Done First
If you are starting from scratch, focus on the big automation wins such as lead routing, data appending and management, and lead scoring. These are still the mainstays of marketing automation platforms like Marketo. Don’t let your system become a glorified email service provider – use your MAP to save huge time and then use that time for heavy duty lead nurturing.
Once you’ve mastered these key marketing automation skills, check out the ebook I wrote with RingLead, The Newcomer’s Guide to Marketing Automation, for even more insight.
If you want to hear more, join me for a special webinar to become a Marketing Automation Rockstar.
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