Choosing marketing automation? Start with your CRM data

Marketing automation platforms are usually bought on features: journeys, scoring, landing pages, email builders. Demos make all of them look effortless. What a demo can’t show is your data, and your data decides whether any of those features will work.

If you are weighing up a platform, whether that is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), Marketing Cloud or something else, the most useful work happens before you sign. Here is what we look at first.

Why the subscription is the expensive mistake

Marketing automation platforms are often sold on a yearly subscription. Choose one that doesn’t suit how you sell, and you keep paying for it while you work out what went wrong. Comparing vendors can quickly become overwhelming, and the shortlist often reflects whoever gave the best demo rather than what your team needs.

So treat selection as a review of your business first and a comparison of tools second.

Four questions to answer before you compare platforms

1. Where do your leads and customers live today?

If the answer is “partly in the CRM, partly in spreadsheets, partly in someone’s inbox”, fix that first. Automation works with whatever it is given. A platform connected to an incomplete CRM sends the wrong emails to the wrong people, only faster.

2. Who owns a lead, and when does it change hands?

Marketing automation sits between marketing and sales. If the two teams don’t agree when a lead is ready for sales, no scoring model will settle it for them. Write the handover down: the point a lead passes to sales, who receives it, and what happens if nobody follows it up.

3. What will you report on, and to whom?

Decide which reports you need before you choose the tool. If the board wants to see return on investment by campaign, the platform must connect campaigns to opportunities in your CRM. That is an integration question, not a feature to tick off a list.

4. Who will run it day to day?

A platform needs an owner who knows it well. If you don’t have one, plan for training or ongoing support from the start, rather than discovering the gap after launch.

Already have a platform and thinking of moving? Review the one you have before you decide. A critical look at your current set-up shows whether the problem is the platform or the way it was configured. If a move is justified, it also gives you the evidence you need to win over internal sponsors.

What a good selection process gives you

By the end of selection, you should have:

• a clear view of where your data lives, and what needs cleaning or moving first
• an agreed definition of when a lead passes from marketing to sales
• the reports you need, and the CRM data each one depends on
• a shortlist of platforms judged against those needs, not against each other’s feature lists
• a plan for who will run the platform after launch

Our one-day launch workshop covers this ground. It looks at your marketing goals at a strategic, operational and technical level, then sets out a solution design for the platform you have chosen. We don’t only review what you think you need. We also recommend the automation tools and techniques that suit the way your business runs.

How 360 Resourcing got the order right

360 Resourcing works across technology, advertising, traditional headhunting and more. When it came to us, sales activity was tracked in Excel, reports were compiled by hand, and data had to be entered twice, once in Engage and again in Sage. The team could not fully trust its data.

Automation was not the first step. We moved the data from the legacy system into a Salesforce structure designed to adapt as the business develops, and put lead, opportunity, account and contact management on one platform. Then we implemented Account Engagement, joined it to Sales Cloud and set up automated engagement programmes. With marketing and sales on the same data, both teams now work from a single view of each customer.

Read the 360 Resourcing case study to see how the CRM and marketing automation work fitted together.

If you need to move quickly

Sometimes the platform decision has already been made, and the priority is getting the team running. Our Quick Start packs for Account Engagement capture your key marketing requirements and get your team up and running on the platform promptly. The groundwork above still applies. It just happens in a shorter, more focused form.

Find out more about our marketing automation services.

Next step

If you are choosing, launching or questioning a marketing automation platform, book a free consultation. We will help you work out what to review first.