It’s a big decision. Should you spend $150K or more (far more) on some software that is supposed to manage and enable all your marketing. Will the return on investment be good enough? Will your people be able to use it effectively? Will this just be a time sink that you pour resources into? Will it fail?
There’s good reason for trepidation. Marketing Automation (MA) software implementations bear a strong resemblance to Sales Automation, or large scale accounting systems. The promise is improved productivity, better performance, lower cost and more customer and prospect satisfaction. But that’s marketing fluff. Anyone who has been in sales and marketing for more than a few years remembers the promises and the failures of these similar systems. For that matter, there are plenty of margin , low value, or abandoned MA implementations. Marketing automation software has evolved and improved, but many early versions were cumbersome, laden with unwanted features, buggy, insecure, difficult and unreliable.
So why should you consider marketing automation? There are numerous fuzzy reasons, but here are the two that matter: You need to understand whether or not this could be a competitive advantage for you, and you need an informed, defensible decision. Even if (and perhaps especially if) you are the ultimate decision maker.
A core premise of Marketing Automation is that it enables and ensures the integration of marketing and sales. To any experienced manager this sounds like a pipe dream–these kids don’t play well together. But with the myriads of touchpoints that a company might present to it’s market today, leaving the process of how a prospect or customer navigates through all those touches and encounters either to chance or to a loosely orchestrated, disjointed process is not only inefficient, it’s uncompetitive. If your competitors manage that better they will have an enduring advantage over you.
Clearly Marketing Automation is not the only way to do that. And just as buying a chainsaw won’t make you a lumberjack, buying Marketing Automation software is no guarantee that you’ll see a useful level of integration. In the Marketing Automation Workshop we’ll explore the features, functions and operation of most of the available software. We’ll look at sucessful and unsucessful implementations. We’ll track some ROI, show best practices. explain how to do the critical tasks. And we’ll help you corellate this information to your business, your market, your people and your resources.
Who We Are
The “we” for the moment, is royal. I’m Bill Babcock, one of the founders and currently a board member of Babcock & Jenkins, an interactive marketing agency in Portland, OR. My company has focused on high tech B2B for the last seventeen years. We’ve worked with just about every major company in that space. A few years ago I resigned from day-to-day operation of the company. I serve in an advisory role, and I study the marketing environment, focusing on Web 2.0 technologies and emerging tools like Marketing Automation.
Babcock & Jenkins is a unique agency, as all our clients would agree. Technically astute is the simplest descriptor. We’ve been developing tools and techniques for marketing throughout our seventeen year history. We do not build or sell marketing automation systems, but we have built and used every component you will encounter in these systems many times over the years. We’ve always lead in these spaces, developing, evangelizing and executing the processes and underlying concepts that marketing automation supports.
This puts us in a particularly useful place to serve as critic and advisor for MA systems. And since I have the time to work on this, I’ll be your guide until I wander into specialized territory. Then I’ll recruit some of the deep talent at B&J and at our clients and friends.
I’m very interested in hearing your experiences with MA implementation, use, and execution. I’d like to hear about the creative processes you employ, how you keep prospects engaged, what conversations youparticipate in, how you manage interactions. You can do this in comments, or through our publishing interface. Contact me via email if you would like access.