Gazing into Marketing Technology’s Future
Clever marketing slogans and tantalizing sales pitches aside, most b-to-b marketing executives realize by now that technology alone won’t chase away their demons. But with a growing need to be systematic, repeatable and measurable in nearly everything they do, finding ways to weave technology’s science around sound process certainly can help keep these demons at bay. Driving maximum value from marketing technology typically comes down to making smarter investment decisions with limited budgets; basically, prioritizing efforts in five key areas that will drive the greatest incremental return.
One: Unified Customer Database
Ah, data quality issues…the bane of many a b-to-b marketer’s existence. Bad data that results in inaccurate records that leads to lost responses, redundant marketing efforts, wasted resources, incorrectly routed leads and frustrated sales reps. Compounding the issue for most organizations is the fact that the problem is far from confined; it spreads across a vast network of disparate databases and spreadsheets. The solution still revolves around the idea of a unified customer database to create visibility into the status and disposition of every prospect and customer across the enterprise, but the application is becoming less pie-in-the-sky.
Two: Enterprise Marketing Management
Coupled with an organization’s need to track and quantify ROI on its marketing investment, economic realities have made it critical for marketers to show their impact on an organization’s bottom line. As a result, a new class of technologies known as enterprise marketing management (EMM) has emerged; EMM combines a marketing automation platform with marketing resource management (MRM) and business intelligence functionality to provide deeper visibility and reporting into all marketing activities, from planning and budgeting to execution and management.
Three: Lead Nurturing
I have witnessed many times the downside of a one-and-done approach to demand creation, where a marketing function interacts with a prospect a single time, then forwards responses to sales and pushes non-responders back to the starting gate to wait for the next campaign. The world of b-to-b demand creation is not nearly so black and white; prospects will have varying degrees of interest depending on where they are in their buying cycle; this interest must be captured and advanced over a period of time. Campaign and lead management solutions that allow you to assign scores to a variety of attributes and activities and to define a series of business rules for further action help “evolve” a prospect by knowing where they are now, and knowing what to do next.
Four: Dashboards
With their ability to provide visibility and actionable analytics across distributed enterprise applications through a single Web-based interface, dashboards continue to draw attention from marketing executives. This promised visibility depends to a large degree on the ability of the dashboard’s underlying technology to not only aggregate outputs from various systems, but to provide analytics and insight that helps executives to modify strategies, tactics and processes for better results.
Five: Sales Systems Integration
Although many organizations are making progress around the strategic and tactical alignment of sales and marketing, the integration of sales and marketing technology has been slower to come about. For the most part, visibility across the demand creation and lead management spectrum has revolved around an examination of CRM-generated data, which is limited due to both a lack of sales adoption and integration with other marketing applications. The use of the CRM system as the system of record for contact data with bi-directional feeds of data is the first step of many to begin to bring the technological worlds of sales and marketing together. Tighter integration between sales and marketing processes will require more systems than just CRM, however. Customized sales communication (CSC) systems used to organize and deliver collateral and tools for sales to drive its opportunities, have the added advantage of allowing marketing to see and understand how content is being used. Marketing and sales leaders also can work together to determine which sales productivity and accounting systems should be integrated with marketing technologies such as territory management and opportunity management systems.
Historically, there has been hesitancy on the part of marketers to embrace technology, as it was often assumed that it would result in a loss of control. But after years of manual business processes and a reliance on decisions made by other parts of the organization regarding the systems they can use and have access to, leading marketers use technology as a key component of their evolution and their relationship with sales.
