Working smarter and leaner has driven the automation of many marketing processes such as segmentation and campaign management.

1. www.marketmakers.co.uk marketmakers
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marketmakers
white paper
Marketing
Automation:
why high-tech
still needs
high-touch to
succeed

2. white paper
www.marketmakers.co.uk marketmakers
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Faced with static or shrinking
budgets, B2B marketers are under
pressure to achieve ever greater
reach and results with their demand
generation programmes. That
means working smarter and leaner,
which has driven the automation
of many marketing processes such
as segmentation and campaign
management.
With the right planning and execution, an
automated campaign can actively enhance
the customer journey by delivering timely and
relevant content. But taken to its extreme, an
unqualified suspect could feasibly be morphed into
a qualified prospect without ever having spoken to
a live human being. So how can marketing, and
the wider commercial organisation, ensure that
efficiency of contact isn’t achieved at the expense
of a meaningful and lasting relationship with their
prospects?
Automated for the people
According to marketing guru Dr Jeffrey Lant’s “Rule
of Seven”, it takes on average seven contacts from
a seller until the buyer feels comfortable enough
to do business. This means time-pressed business
people are inundated with messaging from would-be
vendors.
To stand out from all of the white noise and really
resonate with their target audience, marketers must
ensure their campaign and assets are truly relevant
to a prospect’s needs and stage of his journey.
Saying the right thing, in the right way, to the
right person, at the right time is key to maximising
conversions.
With the need for such laser-like precision, it’s no
wonder that marketing automation has found
favour among the B2B community for delivering
highly personalised, content-based demand
generation strategies. Not only does it give
marketers greater control over prospects along
the pipeline, but it also offers unparalleled visibility
into each prospect interaction. This intelligence
can drive the prospect journey, and by being able
to correlate revenue to specific lead generation
activities can help confirm which tools and tactics
are working better than others.
The automated distribution of content, triggered
by a prospect’s behaviour (or “digital body
language”), is particularly apt when targeting
decision-makers who want to be advised on a
potential purchase and are resistant to being “sold
to”.
Content might include downloadable assets,
such as white papers or case studies; videos and
podcasts; email and the web, including dedicated
micro-sites; and registration to real-world or virtual
events, such as webinars. Offering content that
is educational, rather than salesy, helps position a
vendor as a credible and trusted source of industry
expertise and insight.

3. white paper
www.marketmakers.co.uk marketmakers
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Automation can help to increase conversion
rates by ensuring that early-stage prospects are
properly nurtured, stemming the funnel leakage
that competitors will be only too pleased to mop
up. Its strength also lies in accelerating progress
from enquiry to sales-accepted lead, effectively
shortening the sales cycle.
Bringing process discipline and measurability to
marketing, automation responds to the universal
need to demonstrate return on investment. The
result is increased predictability of activities,
enabling marketers to explicitly prove their worth in
generating qualified sales opportunities. This may
go some way to resolving the disconnect between
sales and marketing that is still conspicuous in far too
many organisations.
As with every new marketing phenomenon,
automation is not a magic bullet. If relied upon in
isolation, it has a number of limitations. It operates
on logic – a system of rules it uses to determine
what communication is sent to the prospect next
– but it can’t always gauge where a buyer is in the
decision-making process.
Automation may be reactive (triggered by a
request for information) or speculative (inferring
that prospects with similar profiles will have similar
interests) but it isn’t anticipatory. A content-based
strategy relies heavily on the quality and
relevance of the campaign’s assets, which may
grow stale over time, and sometimes prospects
don’t necessarily want more information but
more understanding. And while automation can
help you decide how interesting a prospect is to
you, it doesn’t give a foolproof indication of how
interesting you are to your prospect!
Perhaps its ability to facilitate the entire customer
journey is also automation’s Achilles heel. For
example, you send out an email with a link to the
prospect and he visits your website. Based on his
perceived interest, you then send him an invitation
to an event, to which he doesn’t respond, but he
does subsequently download the webinar. You
follow up by sending him a white paper… and so
it goes on. A multitude of touches, but none of
them human. What’s needed is some real-world
interaction and the integration of telemarketing
offers an effective solution.
Telemarketing makes it personal
Telemarketing is a well-established practice, and
while the basic tools haven’t substantially changed
throughout the years, the techniques have been
considerably refined over time. As a versatile, two-way
medium, telemarketing isn’t just a vehicle to
deliver a message but equally an opportunity to ask
questions and, crucially, increase understanding
that will deepen the relationship.
Telemarketing builds on the strengths of automation
in that it uses a structured, efficient and easily
repeatable model. But its other key strength lies
in humanisation: it enables a richer, more natural
exchange between two people, second only
to a face-to-face meeting. And because the
interaction is in real time, there is less chance of
the misunderstandings that can occur with latent
communications.

4. white paper
www.marketmakers.co.uk marketmakers
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While a website or piece of direct mail delivers a
consistent representation of your brand or offer
to every reader, it can’t adapt its tone based on
the recipient’s frame of mind. An experienced
telemarketing agent, on the other hand, can gauge
the mood of the prospect at the other end of the
line and ask searching questions to determine their
needs and how the offering might fit.
An agent can maximise a call by offering to post a
case study, email a white paper or direct a prospect
to the relevant page of a website.
In this way, he creates additional value beyond the
basic fulfilment that could be achieved through
automation and self-service. His willingness to help
creates rapport and cements the relationship with
the prospect. The telemarketing agent becomes an
ambassador for your brand.
While valuable to the prospect, a content-based
strategy always carries the risk of missing the mark,
especially when you only get one shot at the
creative. However, the addition of telemarketing
can bolster the effectiveness of any campaign and
reduce uncertainty in future creative executions.
Want to know whether your last direct mailer or
case study went down well with its readers? Still
guessing whether a prospect is coming to an
upcoming event? Just ask. Telemarketing is an ideal
way of gaining feedback and can enable running
repairs to be made to an online campaign that isn’t
delivering the goods, to rapidly reverse its fortunes.
Perhaps one of the most important roles
telemarketing can play is in creating greater
alignment between sales and marketing, who
often relate to one another as adversaries rather
than allies. Sales frequently accuse marketing
of generating insufficient quantity and quality of
leads, while marketing counter-claim that a large
proportion of leads are not followed up promptly or
enthusiastically enough – or at all.
The cost to attract, hire, train, motivate and retain
a sales force is staggering. The remit of sales is to
convert high value prospects into customers. But a
typical sales professional is only actively engaged
in the actual business of selling for around 25-35% of
the time, with much of the balance spent on lead
generation or qualification.
Often, this is because lead scoring can mean a
prospect is passed to sales without a crucial piece
of qualification. He may have taken a number of
required actions, e.g. email click-through, white
paper download, webinar attendance, but his
“interest” doesn’t translate into intent. His project
may actually be two years from fruition, or he may
be an influencer but not a decision-maker. A
telemarketing call could swiftly establish the missing
element of budget, authority, need or timeline.
Many organisations still harbour common
misperceptions about telemarketing, believing
in-depth inside knowledge of the business is vital
to maintaining credibility with a prospect on the
phone. However, a good telemarketer is an
expert at communication and not the specific
field or product that he or she is promoting.

5. white paper
www.marketmakers.co.uk marketmakers
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To engage a prospect, you need to be smart,
listen, ask appropriate questions and steer the
conversation – but those abilities aren’t exclusive
to an experienced, technically competent sales
executive.
It’s possible to simultaneously identify, qualify and
quantify a sales lead in a single targeted call,
freeing up your expensive sales force to focus on
the directly incentivised task of closing deals.
The last word in the marketing
conversation?
The art of marketing – defining and positioning the
offer and executing the creative – will always rely
on human input. Automation, however, brings
a scientific approach that enables marketers
to streamline the targeting, timing and content
of activity to respond to prospects’ actions and
requirements.
Marketing automation enables innovative and
incredibly efficient ways of increasing the frequency
and relevance of contact, but marketers run the risk
of devaluing both their content and their prospect
interactions by relying exclusively on a self-service
model.
While cutting-edge marketing applications are
enabling unprecedented levels of personalisation, a
phone call is inherently personal. With the surge of
interest in social media, industry gurus are predicting
the end of marketing rhetoric in favour of real
conversation with prospects. Telemarketing is, in
essence, part of that conversation.
Successful relationship-building is founded on
age-old common sense principles. High tech is
nothing without high touch, and the addition of
telemarketing has been repeatedly proven to
increase the potency of other automatically served
forms of messaging, evidenced by the volume
and quality of leads that are produced. And if
“telemarketing” still has outmoded and misplaced
connotations of cold calling and hard selling,
perhaps a brand refresh as “telenurturing” is long
overdue…?
For more information
on intelligence led
telemarketing, please
contact Market Makers
Tel: 0845 468 0880
Website: www.marketmakers.co.uk
Email: marketing@marketmakers.co.uk

6. white paper
www.marketmakers.co.uk marketmakers
About
As a Multi award winning telemarketing agency,
Market Makers build industry-leading, bespoke
campaigns for appointment, sales and lead
generation requirements. With a fully results-orientated
approach,
Market Makers guarantee the highest quality, most
targeted business opportunities, to support the long
term strategic growth of our clients.
As an agency built with direct marketers at the
heart, we believe that telemarketing is not a job
that simply starts and finishes with someone talking
on the phone.
High return telemarketing involves market analysis
and target profiling, expert data sourcing,
results-focused analysis and reporting and, most
importantly, continual assessment and enhancing.
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