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1. Why do I need Marketing Automation if I already
have Salesforce Automation and Email Marketing?
Already have salesforce automation (SFA) and email marketing tools?
Marketing automation makes customer data actionable, sales reps more
effective, and helps produce a higher ROI from salesforce automation,
email marketing, and web analytics tools. Find out how…
JANUARY 2011

2. “The problem In a world inundated with communication, information is power. Target audiences use
24x7 mobile access to information to make highly informed purchase decisions. Com-
is the holistic petition is greater, customer behavior is more visible, and practically everything we do
creates a data point. Marketers use information to try to target buyers with the right
information about products and services. Sales uses information to address buyers needs and desires in
an effort to win deals. Customer service uses information to meet and exceed customer
how customers and expectations. But, the reality is, your company probably doesn’t use information as ef-
fectively as it could.
prospects interact
Why? For one thing, there is simply too much data, and it’s impossible to make all of it
with different actionable even with automated technology. But more importantly, most organizational
functions still operate in silo. Each function has a specific set of tools and technologies
functions (what to engage, track, and monitor customer and prospect interactions. Sales has salesforce
automation tools, customer service has contact-center tools and marketers have a wide
would otherwise be variety of different technologies, the most common including email marketing and web
analytics. The problem is the holistic information about how customers and prospects
called the customer interact with different functions (what would otherwise be called the customer experi-
ence) is rarely available to marketers, sales reps, and contact center agents when they
experience) is need it most.
Today, we call the 3 different functional tools for engaging with customers across sales
rarely available to (1), service (2) and marketing (3), Customer Relationship Management (CRM). We man-
age customer interactions by tracking, storing, and retrieving information across differ-
marketers, sales ent customer experiences. SFA tools are used to manage sales data and interactions,
where call-center and customer service tools manage customer and service data. Often
reps, and contact SFA and customer service tools are integrated with one another to try to create a holis-
tic record of customer interactions over time.
center agents when
they need it most.”
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3. But what about the third pillar under the CRM umbrella—marketing? Where is
the tool to manage and act on this data?
Marketing is a bit of a different animal. With so many different new and emerging market-
ing channels popping up over the last two decades, solution providers emerged across
separate channels. Today, it’s primarily two main channels including email marketing
and web analytics, but increasingly it includes emerging channels such as social media
“Customers don’t and mobile. Tomorrow, it will be another new channel. Enterprise class email marketing
and web analytics tools have both matured in adoption and functionality over the past 5
interact with years. By design these tools generate and collect a great deal of customer data; data that
is largely stored and created within the confines of separate technologies. The concept of
functional silos in CRM is lacking a critical piece of the puzzle. Your marketing data needs a home.
the organization. Actually, it goes well beyond the marketing data needing a home. That’s just part of the
problem. The real driver behind creating a real 360 degree view of your customers and
Customers interact prospects lies in the ability to actually make marketing, sales, and customer service data
actionable. It’s about breaking down the walls that often divide sales and marketing to
with the organization embrace a common theme: Customers don’t interact with functional silos in the organi-
zation. Customers interact with the organization as a whole; the customer experience is
as a whole; the the collective interactions between marketing, sales, and service.
customer experience Sales and service need insight about how marketers engaged with prospects or cus-
tomers. What messages were delivered, when? How did the prospect react? Does their
is the collective behavior imply anything about their specific needs or desires? For sales, this type of
information can have a huge impact on sales effectiveness and efficiency. In fact, it is
interactions between estimated that a 10% increase in marketing data quality can result in as much as a 40%
increase in sales productivity.
marketing, sales, and
What’s Different About Marketing Automation?
service.”
Today, an emerging class of marketing technology has been developed to fill this critical
void in CRM datamarts; marketing automation. Marketing automation technologies typi-
cally include email marketing, campaign workflow, web analytics, content management,
a marketing datamart, and robust integration with SFA tools. But, marketing automation
solutions are still emerging technologies. Today, they are largely being utilized by early
adopter organizations that recognized the value early on. A few common misconcep-
tions stunt adoption of marketing automation.
We use salesforce automation to store prospect activity and we have an enter-
prise class email marketing tool. Why do we still need marketing automation?
The first question to ask is how deeply your existing salesforce automation and email
marketing tools integrate. Many email marketing tools have pre-packaged integration
with SFA, but the integration is often at an aggregate level. What is actually needed for
both sales and marketing to truly increase effectiveness is deep integration across email,
web analytics, social media, tele-sales, and field sales. Even with pre-packaged integra-
tion, email marketing tools don’t help sort the needles in the haystack. The goal of mar-
keting automation is actually to nurture and engage prospects repeatedly through email,
the web, landing pages, and social media channels, so they actually desire to take things
further with a sales rep. As such, marketing automation solutions deliver fewer leads to
sales, but the leads that do make it to sales have a much higher propensity to close.
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4. Marketing automation tools have built in workflow triggers and deep integration with
salesforce automation tools so prospects can be handed off to sales at just the right time.
Marketing automation provides a rich profile of prospect activity and behavior by con-
tact record, as well as the means to act upon key buying signals. Marketing automation
makes email behavioral data actionable. Separate email and web analytics technologies
just don’t cut it when it comes to making the data actionable for marketing and sales.
This is where marketing automation shines. It allows marketing, and specifically the
“The customer marketing technology, to automate the heavy lifting part on the front-end of the funnel
so that sales works only leads that are truly qualified; and probably more importantly,
experience is marketing automation tools provide all of the relevant marketing history to the sales
reps at their fingertips so that when they do engage with the prospect, chances for clo-
the collective sure are that might higher.
interactions between We have an enterprise class web analytics tool. It seems like the web analytics
marketing, sales, and capabilities in marketing automation tools are redundant?
Actually, marketing automation tools don’t replace web analytics, they use some of the
customer service. same basic techniques to provide a completely different set of tools for sales and mar-
keting. Market leading web analytics tools are powerhouse data aggregators. In fact,
Sales has salesforce the biggest challenge for organizations that leverage web analytics tools is figuring out
which data is actually relevant and how to make the data actionable. But how much of
automation. the data in those enterprise class web analytics tools makes it in front of marketing or
sales on a regular basis? For most organizations, the answer is none.
Customer Service has
Web analytics capabilities in marketing automation tools are designed for a different
call-center solutions. purpose. Marketing automation includes pre-built deep integration with email market-
ing capabilities so click-throughs on email can be tracked and monitored. Likewise,
Marketing has…a prospect and customer activity on the site is pumped through marketing automation
triggers and scoring techniques to literally prioritize which leads are hot and which are
half-dozen different not. Marketing automation can automatically alert sales reps about key account activity
or trigger an email campaign based on a customer behavior threshold. Marketing au-
technologies? Your tomation makes web analytics data actionable. And again as above, the reps are more
knowledgeable when they do decide it’s time to engage with a prospect.
marketing data needs
a home, or it’s not Marketing Tools are Evolving Faster than Organizations can Adapt
Marketing is, by nature, complex. Customers demand relevant communications across
really actionable.” a growing plethora of different channels. Unfortunately, this usually means marketers
are trying to catch up with target audiences. Take social media for example. Millions of
consumers and target buyers interact on social media every minute, yet social media
strategy is still nascent in most organizations. Research from Forrester and Marketing-
Profs , “B2B Marketing Budgets And Tactics Online Survey” asked marketers to rank the
,
top three challenges they expected to face in 2010. The top three answers, in rank order
included “generating more leads” “reaching decision-makers” and “improving lead
, ,
quality” The challenges haven’t changed, but the skills and avenues for delivering these
.
challenges is more complex than ever. Marketers are overwhelmed.
Marketing automation technologies are one-stop shops for engaging customers in
cross-channel interactions. With separate tools, marketers are constrained by channels
and resources. True cross-channel marketing engages customers across multiple chan-
nels in one campaign and then tracks and monitors customer activity for channel pref-
erence and buying behavior. Today, marketers are still overwhelmed by the complexity
of multiple solutions. The fact is, it’s just not possible to manually engage customers at
just the right time, in just the right medium.
4

5. Marketing automation tools mitigate these challenges allowing marketers to
send more campaigns in shorter periods of time to relevant audiences.
Yet adoption is slow. Gartner estimates that by 2013, 70% of lead management campaigns
will leverage only one or two tightly integrated channels, which is down from 95% in
20101. Industry leaders that are able to tightly integrate four or more digital channels to
drive lead management processes will outperform single or dual-channel lead manage-
ment campaigns by 300%. But today, marketing automation initiatives have largely been
pushed aside while marketers struggle with the chaos of multiple solutions. Utilizing three
or more channels in a single campaign is nearly impossible without a marketing automa-
tion technology, and yet, that’s where forward thinking competitors are investing.
A recent survey from Velocity Partners asked B2B marketers what they found to be “the
hardest part of B2B marketing. One overwhelming answer took center stage “convinc-
”
ing internal resources” What’s lacking is confidence. Three years ago, marketing au-
.
tomation tools heavily targeted marketers around the benefits of these technologies.
But this messaging largely fell on def ears. Today, you’ll see marketing automation-like
vendors target sales with the same technologies and snazzy new catch phrases like
“revenue performance management platforms” .
The truth is, marketing automation is ABSOLUTELY valuable to sales.
But, marketers need to wake up. For years, marketers have been held accountable for
tangible business results. These are very difficult to measure and quantify when sepa-
rate marketing technologies are in the mix. Marketing automation provides an integrat-
ed home for marketing data. A place where all email sequences, registrations, website
visits, downloads, social interactions, and phone conversations can be centralized in
chronological order. Marketing automation provides a window into prospect activity
and the tools to more effectively touch prospects with relevant, timely engagement with
every interaction. And, it makes sales people more effective and efficient, thus finally
helping marketing and sales departments align.
A Day in the Life of Sales and Marketing Teams Before and After
Marketing Automation
The following two case studies demonstrate how sales and marketing will benefit from
marketing automation, even if the organization has already invested in separate sales-
force automation, email marketing, and web analytic tools. These are REAL examples,
but we changed the company names to protect identities.
These are just two of many challenges that can arise from a lack of integration across
marketing and sales. Each example is followed by an explanation of how marketing auto-
mation can mitigate these challenges for measurable increases in sales close rates, sales
productivity, marketing effectiveness, and revenue growth. If your organization is experi-
encing any of the same challenges, the benefits you could realize from marketing automa-
tion may be just the right catalyst to sell the initiative internally and justify the investment.
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6. A Day in Life Example #1: LearnQuick Software
Company: LearnQuick Software – Marketing and Sales Before Marketing Automation
LearnQuick Software
LearnQuick Software sells on-demand learning management technology. The sales cycle
Current Technologies: is complex and on average lasts 6-9 months. Marketing has developed a fairly robust
SFA, Email Marketing So- set of online resources (whitepapers, blog posts, etc.) for prospects to learn about the
lution, and Web Analytics technology. The marketing department regularly sends out email campaigns inviting
Solution prospects to attend webinars or download whitepapers. Marketers have access to an
enterprise class web analytics solution which they check periodically to see which con-
tent is being downloaded the most and the average number of page views per website
visit. This data resides exclusively in the web analytics tool and only a handful of mar-
keters have access to view it.
Mike Smith is a sales rep at LearnQuick where each week he receives a list of 100-200
potential prospects from marketing that he is assigned to call. On occasion, marketing
will annotate the source of the lead by manually pulling reports from the email tool or
web analytics tool separately. This is arduous and time consuming for marketing to say
the least, so often not done at all, and your reps have little if any information about the
prospects besides their contact information. Sound familiar?
If LearnQuick’s SFA and email marketing tools are integrated, there is a chance that Mike
might know which email campaigns the prospects received, but he would not have any
click through or conversion behavior. And to get the campaign data, he would have to
go manually into the tool to look for it. Again, sound familiar?
Each week Mike dials for dollars, engaging each prospect by phone. Mike spends 80%
of his time trying to articulate the value of the LearnQuick to the people he calls. On oc-
casion he engages with someone who is actually interested in a demo, he enters these
leads into the SFA system as opportunities and starts the next week with a new list.
Company: LearnQuick Software, Inc. – Marketing And Sales After Marketing Automation
LearnQuick Software
Email campaigns from the marketing department are dialog based, meaning follow-up
Current Technologies: emails are automatically delivered based on whether or not a prospect opens an email,
SFA, Email Marketing and the links they click in the email. Marketers also share email campaigns across social
Solution, Web Analytics media channels and track click-through to the website or landing pages from these
Solution, and Marketing channels. Marketing and sales developed a list of buying behavior triggers which mar-
Automation keting used to create lead scoring profiles. These profiles automatically assign numeric
scores to key prospect activities. For example, prospects receive points for filling out
landing pages or registration forms, higher points are given to individuals who indicate
they are “Vice Presidents” and have budget for solutions like LearnQuick. Other points
are assigned for web pages they visit, or an online survey they may respond to. Over
time, the aggregation of points helps marketing identify the hot prospects for sales and
automatically alerts are sent to Sales to contact these prospects.
Mike no longer receives lists of leads from marketing. In the morning, Mike logs into SFA
and receives a list of 5-10 leads that are prioritized by a numerical score. Higher scoring
individuals are hot prospects and have engaged with the LearnQuick website, registration
forms, and email on multiple occasions. These individuals are well educated about the
benefits LearnQuick has to offer. Integration allows Mike to drill down on these prospects
and see a chronological view of all marketing activity over the past few months includ-
ing campaigns received, clicked links, downloads, webinar registrations, events attended,
etc.. Mike can see that one of his prospects received an email and clicked through to
register for a webinar on a brand new feature LearnQuick is developing. Mike uses this in-
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7. formation to have a highly relevant and engaging phone conversation with the prospect.
Mike enters this into SFA with notes, and the conversation becomes part of the prospect’s
contact history. Mike is far more productive after marketing automation and can focus his
effort calling only those prospects that are qualified, and has a higher chance of success
given all of the background information he has to prepare for the call.
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Marketing and sales create Prioritized leads are Sales leverages contact and
lead scoring profiles that rank automatically sent to sales for conversation history on each
prospects per given criteria. engagement. prospect to increase success.
A Day in Life Example #2: ExcellentEvents, Inc.
Company: ExcellentEvents – Marketing And Sales Before Marketing Automation
ExcellentEvents
ExcellentEvents is a tradeshow and events management company working on organiz-
Current Technologies: ing a large technology tradeshow. ACME Widgets is sponsoring this year’s event and
SFA, Contact Center, Email was one of the first sponsors to sign with a full-price Platinum sponsorship costing
Marketing Solution, and $100,000. The marketing department from ExcellentEvents manages all email marketing
Web Analytics Solution communications and there is integration between their SFA and email marketing tools,
but it is an out-of-the box type of configuration, so it is not very deep in terms of sharing
relevant data. And, they do not utilize a marketing automation tool. A few weeks before
the sponsorship deadline, the marketing department from ExcellentEvents still has to
fill two more sponsorship slots. The marketing department launches a tele-marketing
campaign to personally reach out and call prospect vendors for a special opportunity to
sponsor. Joe, a tele-sales rep from ExcellentEvents, calls ACME Widgets, unaware that
ACME Widgets is already a sponsor, and offers a 50% discount on a Platinum sponsor-
ship. Sound familiar?
Company: ExcellentEvents – Marketing And Sales After Marketing Automation
ExcellentEvents
ExcellentEvents is desperate for two more sponsorships to fulfill their contract. The
Current Technologies: marketing department uses the marketing automation tool to run a segmented list. They
SFA, Contact Center, Email exclude all current sponsors, and vendors who have been flagged as “confirmed no to
Marketing Solution, Web sponsorship” The list is shared with the Joe, the Sales Rep, either electronically by flag-
.
Analytics Solution, and ging them in the SFA, or by emailing the list or printing it out. Joe can do last minute
Marketing Automation outreach without worrying about calling existing sponsors.
An email marketing campaign is set up with the remaining opportunities; suppression
rules ensure no current sponsors receive the email campaign. The campaign is person-
alized with information about last year’s event. Recipients receive an email reminding
that they were a sponsor last year and the exact level they sponsored at (which is dy-
namically updated based on the prospects record). Recipients are encouraged to reach
7

8. out to ExcellentEvents for “special consideration on last minute sponsorship for the
upcoming event” The use of personalization results in 10x the click through rate over
.
generic email campaigns. ExcellentEvents signs 2 more sponsorships and representa-
tives from both companies indicated they were new to their role and didn’t realize their
companies had sponsored last year. And, equally as important, ExcellentEvents did not
upset their existing full paying platinum sponsor, ACME Widgets.
10x
Email campaign is created Recipients receive email Click through rate of
with appropriate suppression customized with data from personalized email is 10x that
rules in place. their profiles. of a generic email campaign.
The Relationship between Marketing Automation and Sales Effectiveness
For many companies, their salesforce automation tool has become the central point of
record for customer data in many organizations. But, integration between salesforce au-
tomation and marketing technologies is still significantly lacking. The truth is, salesforce
automation mostly contains only sales data; opportunities, sales contacts, bookings, and
forecast targets. Sales people are missing visibility into a critical piece of the customer
experience; marketing. In most cases, prospects have been inundated with market-
ing campaigns and programs long before they started talking to sales. If salespeople
do not have access to this information, they essentially have to start the conversation
over again with the prospect. To be effective, marketing automation must integrate
tightly with the salesforce automation tool, email marketing, and web analytics to not
only prioritize leads, but provide a window into the prospect’s intentions before the first
meeting with sales. Marketing automation enables sales teams to do what they do best
– SELL; marketing automation makes sales teams not only more efficient as they are
only calling qualified leads, but also increases sales effectiveness because sales efforts
are resultantly more personalized and relevant through the use marketing automation.
About Neolane
Neolane provides the only conversational marketing technology that empowers orga-
nizations to build and sustain one-to-one lifetime dialogues, dramatically increasing
revenue and marketing efficiency. Born digital, with best-in-class email and inbound-
outbound channel fusion capabilities architected into a single code-based platform, mar-
keters achieve results in record time. Neolane is easy to use for both power and casual
users, but powerful enough to drive the most sophisticated marketing strategies. Future
proof, Neolane has a track record of enabling its customers to adapt to new customer
engagement challenges and exploit opportunities more quickly than their competition.
Neolane is used by more than 250 of the world’s leading companies including Sony
Music, Alcatel-Lucent, Orange, Sears Canada, and Sephora. Visit www.neolane.com and
read our blog The Cross-Channel Conversation.
1 Gartner, “Twenty-Two CRM Marketing Insights to Consider for the CMO Dashboard” 2010, Chris Fletcher
,
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Copyright 2011 Neolane, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This research brief is for informational purposes only. Neolane, Inc. makes no warranties, expressed or implied, in this
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property of their respective owners.
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