In our last blog, we talked about what marketing automation is and the benefits associated with it. You’re convinced that this is what your company needs. So how do you convince others of this? Why invest in marketing automation?
Every organization experiencing success with marketing automation has a different answer to this question. Here are the three that surface most often:
1. Revenue
Marketing automation positively impacts both the top and bottom lines, with many results seen quickly after implementation:
Top line. Improving the experience and engagement of prospects and customers drives more demand for products and services, generates more high quality leads, and helps close more first-time and repeat sales.
Bottom line. Improving process and operational efficiencies decreases costs (e.g., resources, capital equipment, outsourcing) while increasing profitability.
2. Achieve Organizational Goals
Marketing automation helps businesses realize core strategic goals, including:
Brand relevance. Marketers can more easily, quickly, and effectively deliver the right message to the right person at the right time via the right channel. This dramatically increases your brand’s relevance in customers’ eyes.
Increased efficiency. Launch campaigns in hours or days, with little or no IT support needed and no special coding skills. Automating common tasks allows you to build relationships – at scale – with fewer resources while increasing personalization. Sales can use lead intelligence to shorten the sales cycle.
Data intelligence. Visibility into the performance of campaigns, personas, and buying stages allows organizations to optimize marketing efforts, improve results, increase sales quotas, and measure ROI.
3. Improve Internal Cooperation
Marketing automation systems provide the infrastructure for sales and marketing to work together.
Sales and marketing cooperation. Many aspects of marketing programs must be calibrated to the sales team’s needs. When the teams align, their mutual decisions are implemented via the marketing automation system. Combined with an effective CRM system, this alignment results in nurturing, scoring, and handoff processes tuned to sales requirements, leading to intradepartmental trust and more effective follow-up.
Sales intelligence. The real-time intelligence about a lead’s fitness, concerns, and behaviors lets the sales rep begin a warm, targeted conversation and build a relationship more quickly. It also reduces the need for cold calls.
Keeping those benefits in mind, it also makes sense to minimize your investment risks. To minimize investment risk, consider a vendor that offers pricing tied to the number of active contacts you plan to email each month. That way, you’re not charged for the size of your database – only the contacts you actively email to. By starting small and testing the waters, you can learn what works and expand as needs and benefits become more apparent. Marketing automation’s reporting capabilities will help you validate the system’s worth and document your return on investment.
Try Using Case Studies
Show your executives that other companies in your industry or other companies of your size are achieving success with marketing automation. Look for case studies that make one of those points, or look for a study that spotlights how someone used marketing automation to solve a problem your own company recognizes as a pain point worth solving. Your goal is to show parity of some kind and reinforce the idea that companies like yours are seeing a return on investment with marketing automation. Be sure to research whether one or more of your competitors is using marketing automation.
Read our next blog for more on how to make the case to executives.
Debbie Paul is Partner at Distribution Strategy Group. Debbie helps distributors identify and communicate their value so they can better serve and sell to their customers. At Newark Electronics, she oversaw the growth of small- to medium-sized high-potential accounts with results of over 10% growth in the first year, continuing in subsequent years at a rate of 15-20%. Ready to tap the full potential of your customer base? Contact Debbie at dpaul@distributionstrategy.com.