The very real perils of poorly implemented marketing automation
We’ve all heard the old adage fail to plan, plan to fail. Well this statement could never be truer than in the case of marketing and sales automation. SaaS businesses have really duped us all into believing that it’s as easy as 1-2-3. It’s NOT. Well, buying software is easy yes. But implementing it to work for your business is quite another thing. And this is where things get messy.
Here are the 3 Critical Success Factors for a Great Implementation
Your Organization Structure
- Marketing must be led from the C-Suite
- You need to hire and retain top talent
- Teams need to be aligned vertically and horizontally
- Clean data needs to be analyzed for insights
- Select a lean and effective technology stack not just an ad-hoc mish mash of softwares
Your Marketing Plan
- Create your overarching plan first
- Set specific goals
- Create your content marketing plan
- Create accountability between marketing and sales
- Establish a closed-loop reporting process
- Get the right resources in place
- Create the analytics reporting leadership wants to see = Growth and ROI
Feed the Beast
- Make your website a demand generating machine
- Fill the funnel with new leads with the 4 pillars of digital marketing in place
- Site
- Search Paid and Organic
- Social
- Mobile
Now The Perils of Not Doing This
In our practice we speak to businesses every day who have been sold a bill of goods. They either pulled the trigger on buying software too soon, or implemented it and are disappointed. The latter is somewhat more serious a scenario. Many blame the software and are now considering changing their marketing automation tool. The primary reason this happens is because the pre-work was never truly done. Blaming the software is like blaming a tennis racket when you lose a match.
Businesses make decisions based on cost, technology, or because they think they need marketing automation way too early in their marketing maturity curve. So many marketing automation investments fail because there is no true demand generation strategy in place. These systems are intended to save time by adding in a layer of automation to an already solid demand generation structure. They should be saving time not becoming a huge make work project. And the same can be said of CRM systems.
The ONLY reason to automate is to scale at speed without having any of your leads fall through the cracks.
If you are considering purchasing marketing automation software this year, contact us and we can help you through the decision-making process. If you have a system and it’s not performing the way you had hoped, we can help there too.
Don’t waste time trying to cover up past mistakes or being unsure what to do. Contact Sharon Herrnstein, Chief Marketing Officer at sharon.h@vglobalinc.com today for a FREE and no obligation consultation call. We can help get you back on track so that your investment in marketing automation truly supports your organization’s goals.
