Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

It’s no secret that I view marketing automation platforms as crucial to any marketing or sales organization, and that in today’s ultra-competitive market, they are quickly becoming a must-have, rather than a “nice to have” tool.

Having said that, there’s one big issue that interferes with the full adoption of marketing automation solutions by smaller and midsize companies: many companies simply can’t afford it.

Currently available marketing automation platforms have complex user interfaces and require a trained, technical administrator to operate and maintain them. But many midsize and small companies are still struggling to recover from the Great Recession and can’t possibly stretch their resources even more and hire technical staff.

The result: Even if these companies have invested in a marketing automation platform, they don’t derive real value from the solution. In a business environment that demands immediate results from marketing and sales, these companies are quickly setting up the system, and hoping for the best. But in many cases, because of lack of time and expertise, they are not fully using their existing CRM system’s functionality.

The way I see it, organizations need a marketing automation platform that virtually ANY staff member can use to build, monitor and refine successful demand generation programs, no matter their training level. Very few companies can afford to implement an elaborate, difficult to use marketing automation system that requires time and expertise if one is to derive the full benefits it offers.

If the goal is to improve demand generation campaigns, increase sales effectiveness and encourage marketing-sales alignment, then the marketing automation platform implemented must be simple to use. Unfortunately, many marketing and sales staff view marketing automation tools as another piece of software they aren’t going to use. The only way to prevent this is to improve usability.

The CONCEPT of marketing automation is wonderful, and it works – in theory. But what we now need is a marketing automation platform that works in real life, when marketing and sales people use it – not a platform that requires advanced technical skills. We need a marketing automation platform with simplified, intuitive core components that enable low-level staff to easily segment, build and analyze marketing campaigns, while also making it simple for executives to monitor and tweak campaign performance instantly and on an ongoing basis.

I was impressed by a smart observation recently made by Holger Schulze.

“In the “old days”, the mainstream marketing approach was to interrupt and engage prospects, educate them on the vendors offering and move them through the sale cycle towards a transaction… today, these buyers and decision makers don’t want to get interrupted by a product promo email or a cold call that likely doesn’t come at the exact time they have a specific problem the caller can help with.”

This observation pretty much captures the reason marketing automation and sales acceleration tools have gone from “nice to have” to “must have” over the past few years. You simply can’t interrupt anymore, and I feel fairly confident adding that this is actually true for consumer product marketing too.

Today’s buyers and consumers refuse to be interrupted. Think about it – how do you feel about large pop-up ads, about promotional emails that you did not ask for, about a telemarketing call? I would venture a wild guess here – these things make you feel impatient and annoyed – and that’s on the days when everything is going well and you’re in a good mood!

The “Do Not Interrupt” rule applies to all marketing activities today. People are busy, life is as hectic as it can be (I certainly hope it will not get faster, or more hectic, than this), and when someone interrupts us with messages we did not ask for and are not interested in hearing, we get annoyed, so annoyed in fact that our immediate reaction is often to not just delete the messages or tune them out, but find a way to get rid of them permanently, by taking an action such as unsubscribing.

Unsubsciribig: a marketer’s worst nightmare.

So you want to make sure you don’t ever interrupt a buyer, and the only way to make sure you don’t is either to be completely passive and wait for them to approach you, which is of course unacceptable for a business, or being proactive but precise. You want to be in touch, you want to be top of mind, but you absolutely want to make sure you do so in a way that will work WITH the buyer and not against them, in a way that will help rather than interfere.

Marketing automation and sales acceleration tools enable you to do exactly this – to listen to your prospects, to each and every one of them (you could never do that manually), and identify the exact points where they are receptive to your messages – when your messages will help and not interrupt. That’s what we’re here for, and that’s why it works: using marketing automation tools is the only way to make sure you never, ever, interrupt.

Don’t you wish companies would show the same respect to you as a consumer?