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.

The B2B buying process has changed dramatically over the last decade. Whereas marketers used to be in control, blasting prospects with emails and getting a fairly high response rate, corporate buyers today are far less passive and take an active role when searching for solutions for their organizations. Today’s customers begin to research potential vendors online long before they buy. They are forming an opinion much earlier in their decision-making process and based on independent research. As a result, companies have to do a much better job of timing their messaging to fit this new sales cycle.

Research shows that a whopping 85 percent of buyers research product options online before ever contacting potential vendors. These prospects are visiting your website, gathering information, then moving on to your competitors’ websites to gather information on their solutions prior to deciding whom to contact.

How can you as an organization reclaim a more active role in the marketing process? The best way to do that is by tracking those website visitors, nurturing them, and following up with them when they are ready to buy. It is absolutely crucial to enter all qualified, not-quite-sales-ready-yet leads into your database and keep tracking them and nurturing them until you identify – via their behavior on your website – that they are ready to be contacted by a sales rep.

Of course, tracking a large number of web visitors,  properly segmenting them and nurturing them over what can easily be many months is nearly impossible to do manually, which is why Marketing Automation tools have become an essential part of modern marketing campaigns. Marketing Automation solutions enable companies to track web visitors, analyze their behavior, segment them and nurture them according to readiness levels, and eventually contact them at the right moment, with the right information that turns your sales rep’s call into anything but a cold call.

Doing all of this manually is not just difficult, time-consuming and expensive in terms of the manpower needed (can you really do this with a database that contains ten thousand, fifty thousand, three hundreds thousand leads?) but is also prone to costly marketing mistakes that could result in turning off a large number of viable customers and essentially sending them directly to the competition.

In today’s market, Marketing Automation is not a luxury. It is a necessary tool that saves you time and money, creates measurable, highly efficient marketing campaigns and accelerates the sales process.

Last year, we wondered if 2009 was going to be “the year of Marketing Automation” and in many ways, it was. The combination of an increasingly buyer-centric sales cycle in the B2B space and the tough reality of a long recession combined to put pressure on marketing organizations to cut costs while improving lead nurturing and customer retention programs. Marketing accountability, a relatively new idea, became mainstream – suddenly marketing departments were expected to show clear ROI – but in the B2B space with its complex sales cycles, this is impossible to do – unless you automatically monitor and track your prospects.

In 2010, we expect to see an even stronger trend towards marketing accountability and measurability. With the recession gradually lifting and corporate spend on marketing programs slowly increasing, and with buyers continuing to gain control of their own buying processes, we expect to see more and more companies investing in the only way to regain control of the buying process – Sales Acceleration and Marketing Automation tools.

In 2010, buyers will become more and more choosy about which communications they are willing to receive and respond to. Organizations will have to provide more value than ever during the marketing process. Since Marketing Automation tools enable companies to tailor their communications to the exact needs of the specific prospect, they will become more important than ever.

Buying relationships will be increasingly based on a strong foundation of buyer nurturing and education, provided for free and on time by B2B organizations who manage to communicate with prospects with the right information, at the right time, without being annoying. Since achieving this manually is nearly impossible, and at the very least extremely costly, marketing automation systems that provide lead-nurturing tools would become a necessity rather than a luxury, especially for B2B companies.

As buyers gather more and more of their early information on vendors and solutions online, the role of the sales organization will change. In 2010, sales reps will expect to only make “warm calls” to qualified prospects on whom they have at least basic information and who are at least somewhat ready to buy. “Cold calls” to uninterested prospects will be considered wasteful. Thus, Sales acceleration and Marketing Automation tools such as lead scoring and real time lead alerts will become an integral part of the sales process.

For the first time in the history of corporate America, Marketing organizations are becoming accountable. Automated Marketing solutions enable smart marketers to track leads from the moment they land on the company’s website until the sales person closes a deal. The art of marketing is still there, of course, and we do believe marketers need to be creative – but in 2010, operational marketing skills will become at least as important as creative skills.