Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

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.

Despite economic doom and gloom, 2009 looks to be a banner year for Marketing Automation solutions. As organizations look corporate-wide for opportunities to trim budgets, marketing executives are re-thinking their marketing strategies to demonstrate measurable results – and of course, hold on to their budgets. According to the Aberdeen Group, in their recent report “Lead Nurturing: The Secret to Successful Lead Generation”, B2B marketing organizations expect to increase spending by 50% on lead nurturing and customer retention programs in 2009.

Just as Henry Ford used automation to produce an affordable car with increased efficiency of manufacture, Marketing Automation platforms are changing the way marketers drive demand with fewer resources. Solutions that automatically engage, manage, and qualify prospects have cleared the Gartner “Trough of Disillusionment,” and, with an additional push from a down economy, are rapidly finding a home in even the most non-analytic marketing organizations. E-mail and online marketing programs can be launched quickly, are cost effective, and provide immediate feedback. Whether you’re tracking responses to an email campaign or tracking each page a prospect touches on your web site, these programs are measurable and can be used to automatically trigger future more targeted messages the close more sales. Automation is key to constant and repeatable results.

Ford did not invent the concept of an assembly line, but he did perfect it. Before Ford, skilled craftsman built cars as a team, custom fitting parts and assembling them in place until each vehicle was complete. Automation reversed the process. Instead of workers going to the car, the car came to the worker who performed the same task of assembly over and over again. Ford reduced the assembly time of a Model T from 12 1/2 hours to less than 6 hours.

Marketing is one of the last business functions to embrace technology, automation, and true measurability. With internal competition for budget dollars and external competition for fewer customer dollars, the time to automate and follow the lead of Henry Ford has come.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs. -Henry Ford