The most obvious feature of a Marketing Automation implementation should be integration of touchpoints and contacts with prospects and customers. If this integration is not clean and complete then the implementation will never deliver major benefits. For many years it’s been clear that generating leads of varied maturity and shipping them off to sales is a low-value approach. Customer Relationship Management and Sales Automation software aimed to increase the value of leads, but in most implmentations did not deliver a high ROI because the full cycle was either not addressed or was done so in an incomplete manner. Any sale of moderate to high value takes place with a definable cycle, with prospects entering the cycle at various points. If you are investing in software to facilitate alignment of marketing and sales goals, then it must integrate across the sales cycle.
Consider this greatly simplified process:
A prospect responds to a direct mail solicitation and registers on an associated web page.
Marketing emails a personalized follow-up on behalf of the individual sales rep assigned to the lead.
Nurturing emails continue over time
The prospect opens the emails, visits related web pages and displays behaviors that track to their poisitiion in the sales cycle
The assigned sales rep receives instant notification of each response and can assess location in the sales cycle and likely value of the lead
When the rep decides to send an email to the prospect they choose from a library of tested content, relevant to the prospect’s characteristics
When the prospect opens the email andor visits the site the rep is notified
Additional marketing touches consider all the email the prospect has recieved to avoid repetition
With integration, MA software can track customer interaction across all channels, including all response media, Web, email, external web, phone, and even in-person sales calls. Marketing materials and content can be leveraged greatly, enabling reuse and optimization of results. Without integration all these elements remain siloed, interfering with each other, causing conflicts, reducing prospect satisfaction and interest, and wasting resources.