Comments on: Re-casting How We Think About B2B Marketing Automation

By: What’s the Difference Between CRM and Marketing Automation in B2B Demand Generation? (DG) « Propelling Brands

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:07:16 +0000

[...] in this post is around the strategic role of marketing automation – a topic I also covered in a past post on MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog. I note in the DG post: Marketing automation — at it’s most fundamental level — was [...]

By: What’s the Difference Between CRM and Marketing Automation in B2B Demand Generation? | Demand Generation Blog

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:26:31 +0000

[...] marketing automation in this integral and strategic fashion, not as a stand-alone technology. I characterized this point of view in a MarketingProfs post as the ’strategic’ (versus ‘operational’) view of marketing [...]

By: Process + Infrastructure for the New Era of Buyer-centric Marketing … An Update on My Book Project « Propelling Brands

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:54:10 +0000

[...] First, let me explain that this is a project that I’ve always been pursuing on my own time – i.e., writing early in the morning, late at night or on the weekends. And that is something that’s been challenging to do, given my active role at Silverpop as director of field marketing and as the company’s ‘B2B Marketing Evangelist.’ Many of you know I’ve spent the greater part of the last 13+ months on the road throughout North America and Europe, speaking, meeting with customers, launching new events (such as B2B Marketing University) and educating the marketing community about how to strategically leverage marketing automation technology. [...]

By: Index of My B2B Marketing Posts Over the Last 12 Months « Propelling Brands

Index of My B2B Marketing Posts Over the Last 12 Months « Propelling Brands — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:05:27 +0000

[...] “Re-casting How We Think About B2B Marketing Automation” | 21 January 2010, MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog [...]

By: The Three Building Blocks for Effective B2B Demand Generation — Lead Management, Marketing Automation and Content Marketing | Demand Generation Blog

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:28:15 +0000

[...] More than ever — in an environment where the B2B buyer has power and where the nature of the B2B buyer is changing — it’s critical that our demand generation activities have a ‘buyer-centric’ posture. This is something I highlighted in a recent MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog post, “Re-casting How We Think About B2B Marketing Auto… [...]

By: DRAFT Marketing Automation and the ROI of the Paradigm Shift « Kafka93's Blog

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:04:49 +0000

[...] Marketing Automation and the ROI of the Paradigm Shift By kafka93 Reading this post on MarketingProfs by Adam Needles of Silverpop, titled “Re-casting How We Think Abou… I see that even from the point of view of the marketing automation company, getting on board with [...]

By: Paul McKeon

Paul McKeon — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:03:25 +0000

Adam, I thought your post was right on in justifying the need for marketing automation as a result of the changing nature of the buying audience. Many of these systems are justified solely on the basis of measurement and ROI. My view with regard to the measurement aspect is encapsulated in a new twist on the old axiom: “I know that half of my marketing dollar is working, I just don’t know which half.” The new axiom might be: I have 100% visiibility into my marketing program, but it is still only half as a effective as it could be.” The usual reason: with all the emphasis on process and measurement, today’s marketers often forget about one thing: a good idea.

By: Eric Goldman

Eric Goldman — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:47:07 +0000

First off, Adam, thanks for an informative post. You asked us to think about the differences between strategic and operational Marketing Automation and to give you our definition of Marketing Automation. Here’s my take:
We (Gossamar Inc) divide the Process of Marketing Automation into 4 distinct phases or sub-processes:
1) Attract the right visitors (this is done via SEO, SMM (Social Media Marketing) and PPC. You can of course also use traditional media and Outbound Marketing approaches like Trade Shows and Media advertising, but we tend to focus on Inbound Techniques because that’s who we are.
2) Engage the visitors to your site with Content. Great, thought-leading content which convinces your visitors that you are the best in this sphere.
3) Content which is so desirable that your Visitors Convert (register on site), to get more of it. The process of conversion here yields the visitors’ names and email addresses and – by so doing – gives you their permission to market to them. This officially launches the “Buying Cycle”.
4) Qualify and Nurture. This is done through the automation system’s Grading and Scoring of the lead’s profiles (grade) and digital footprints (behaviour = score), as well as the multi-touch or drip email campaigns and automated business rules.
Because we work in the Sales and Marketing Automation world, we continue on with the Automation cycle by diving into the world of Customer Relationship Management too, and we would next describe the remainder of the above cycle in terms of what happens to those prospects which achieve a high enough Grade and Score to be fed directly into the CRM (such as Salesforce, for example), and then what happens to these leads as they are assigned to a sales rep and he or she works them further round the buying cycle (which now, for the first time since the lead arrived on site, begins to resemble a more traditional sales cycle).
Given all the above, I believe Inbound Marketing Automation is both a leap into strategy because it changes the way you your mix of marketing initiatives and the approaches you use to generate leads, and a walk along the operational road because you will have to change all your processes to suit, and also redesign the way your sales and marketing organizations work together.
And with all that which sounds like (and is) a great deal of work to implement, one had better find the right amount of money with which to to do it all. So to Paul, Jeff, Beth and Parker who are interested in budgets and justifying campaigns, you may find these links (below) interesting. They describe ways to calculate the ROI of social media campaigns, online marketing campaigns, and even your website as a whole. These approaches sacrifice 100% accuracy for simplicity, but they work well enough to use with confidence. The three posts give you the methods and tools you need:
1) How to calculate the ROMI of your website as a whole: http://bit.ly/6bFSvs
2) A list of the 10 best free ROI calculators on the web: http://bit.ly/7fwBkF
3) How to build your own ROI calculator (perhaps for your social media campaign): http://bit.ly/6IGZQh
Finally, also on our website (just look for it on the blog), is a post aimed at those who want to launch their own SMM campaign but don’t know how or where to start. This post, entitled, “How to run a Social Media Campaign,” will give you some help.

By: Adam Needles

Adam Needles — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:56:17 +0000

@ Beth – Thanks to you and the gang for a warm welcome. Excited to be part of the blogging team.

By: Adam Needles

Adam Needles — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:55:38 +0000

@ Paul – Yours is a good call-out, and I’d say that there are two perspectives.

One, without fail, there is case study after case study available pointing to the ROI of marketing automation — when implemented in parallel with change management. That ROI is evidenced in terms of increased quality of leads and increased close rates. SiriusDecsions is one firm that can provide this type of benchmarking. So with the ability to say, here’s how much our cash flows go up, versus our investment, this is a simple NPV calculation. If it’s positive, it’s rational to move forward with the investment. But I’ll note this argument only speaks to the operational definition I offered above. There is also a strategic impact — in terms of being more buyer-centric — that is harder to fully quantify up front, but that will also change how you operate as a firm. And that will add to the net ROI but in sometimes incalculable ways.

Closely related to this issue is the need to re-organize your marketing team staffing. A hybrid field marketing 2.0 and marketing operations team needs to be put in place to help you take full advantage of marketing automation. (BTW — I’ll be talking about this at the B2B Marketing University this spring.) This will include net increase in headcount, but together with this team and your platform you’ll be able to market in more efficient ways, and you’ll actually be able to decrease spending in areas such as top-of-the-funnel lead-gen and will be able to reduce headcount of channel-executional marketers. If you more-efficiently manage leads and manage the middle of your funnel — improving yield — the less you need to fill the top. So the NPV equation looks like this

+$ REVENUE INCREASE -$ NEW HEADCOUNT +$ NO LONGER NECESSARY HEADCOUNT +$ NO LONGER NECESSARY TOP-OF-FUNNEL LEAD GEN PROGRAMS -$ COST OF PLATFORM = NPV

If that’s a positive number, Houston you’re a go.

Two — and I’m not saying this is the correct way to view it — but this is parallel with the ERP world. (To me ERP is about holistic supply chain management systems, and marketing automation w/ CRM is about building holistic demand chain management systems.) In the early days of the ERP world, there was not budget that existed for ERP, but once it started to prove its chops, it became a line item. So part of me is willing to say that there is a little leap of faith. Does any major company doubt ERP is a good thing today? Marketing automation just needs a line item. Again, not saying this is the best or most convincing argument, but it’s a perspective to consider — especially as it continues to prove its chops. Interestingly enough, we did a joint study with Forrester recently, and in the interviews, ROI was the least-most-imporant issue that came up.

I recognize you still need to build a case, and I’d ALSO offer that one of the sessions we’re going to be covering at B2B Marketing University this year is how to make the case to senior management. In fact, Mac McIntosh will be presenting on that topic on our March 3 event in Washington, DC.

By: What is Driving B2B Marketers to Adopt Marketing Automation Technology? | Demand Generation Blog

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:22:10 +0000

[...] mass one-to-one marketing on a scale basis. (In fact, this is something I focused on in my recent post on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog – analyzing the strategic versus operational definition of B2B marketing automation.) Thus [...]

By: Parker Trewin

Parker Trewin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 02:13:03 +0000

Adam, great post and couldn’t agree with you more.

We’ve written extensively about aligning with the buying cycle and targeting content to the buyer’s stage on the B2B Marketing for Faster Sales blog.

Recently, David Thompson wrote a great post about Bionic Marketing and how marketing automation empowers sales (We can rebuild him. We can make him stronger, faster, smarter?) to better serve the customer when the customer is ready, It’s good and fun stuff: http://www.genius.com/marketinggeniusblog/1800/the-age-of-the-bionic-marketer-part-1.html

We also wrote about the inbound bound being a huge trend for B2B Marketers: http://www.genius.com/marketinggeniusblog/1850/5-big-trends-in-marketing-automation-2010-5-branding-goes-social.html

As aside, I had a conversation with SiriusDecisions’ Jonathan Block and he indicated that marketing automation penetration is only around 20% so the opportunity might even be greater. Good new for all the vendors out there.

By: Beth Harte

Beth Harte — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:00:43 +0000

Adam, welcome to the Daily Fix! Looking forward to more posts about marketing automation.

Also, I agree with Paul. Any suggestions for how to overcome budget issues?

By: Jeff Ogden

Jeff Ogden — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:25:02 +0000

As the head of marketing for a firm shopping for marketing automation, as well as the author of How to Find New Customers, I have a unique perspective on marketing automation. Here are some thoughts:

1) For the most part, the leaders all look alike. This has serious ramifications on pricing.
2) The shift to inbound marketing is a threat to the traditional marketing automation vendors.
3) There are too many vendors on the market. Consolidation is inevitable.
4) Content has become the lynchpin. Marketing automation vendors should align themselves with content creators.

Jeff Ogden

By: Paul Barsch

Paul Barsch — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:57:10 +0000

Hi Adam, 100% agree on need for marketing automation. However, marketers traditionally don’t have the budget to “do it right”–and by that I mean not on the cheap with disjointed, haphazard tools and incomplete data sets. Ideas for where the budget comes from??