About a year ago, we asked, “Is 2009 the year of Marketing Automation?” and observed that despite the bad economy, and maybe even because of it, marketing organizations will find that automating their email campaigns is a must.
The need to demonstrate efficiency and measurable results, combined with tighter budgets, have indeed placed more emphasis than ever on pipeline health, on nurturing leads and on retaining customers, all of which require automation to be done properly.
2009 was great!
As we predicted, 2009 was a great year for marketing automation – the year that established marketing automation as a necessity rather than a luxury. As a result, we had an amazing fourth quarter where we saw a 35% increase in sales.
Which is why we were not at all surprised to read a recent article on Demand Gen Report, which said that “the fourth quarter sales growth reported by several vendors, combined with a significant uptick in pipeline activity during the first few weeks of the New Year, point to 2010 emerging as a breakout year for the category.”
2010 will be even better
2009 was a good year for marketing automation, and we expect 2010 to be even better. But we are also aware that the economy is still shaky, and that organizations are still being very careful with their budgets, which is why we have developed eTrigue SalesPro.
Sales enablement tools will be especially successful
eTrigue SalesPro is a sales enablement tool that works for companies with tight budgets because it’s very affordable yet still provides all of the “sales” benefits of a marketing automation platform (unlimited emails, tracking, real time alerts) without requiring users to implement a more costly full marketing automation solution.
Focusing on sales acceleration makes sense for companies who are still on tight budget, who want to automate important aspects of their pipeline management but are unable to invest in full marketing automation right now. These companies will likely upgrade to a full system later on, when the economy fully recovers, but for now, if they have to choose between full automation or no automation, they would have to choose “no automation” and stay behind the competition. eTrigue SaledPro solves the dilemma and enables these businesses to improve their sales operations and align marketing and sales, while sticking with their budgets.
Marketing automation a must
We completely agree with Lewis of Demand Gen International: Over the next 5 years, every corporate marketing team will adopt marketing automation in some fashion. It’s like the early 90’s when marketing teams were realizing that a website was not just a nice thing to have but an absolute must. The same thing is going to happen with social media – and with marketing automation.
