Marketing Automation... Without the Pain

Marketing automation software offers the potential for sales nirvana: an automated flow of qualified leads. But the pain required to reach that nirvana can be too great for many companies.

I’ve heard all of these things over the last couple of years - more than once in each case:

• “We talked to [various providers] but they wanted 100k pounds per brand and we can’t justify that sort of investment without some sort of proof that we’ll get ROI.”
• “I’d love to use [marketing automation software] but we’ve only recently invested in our CMS and have a good relationship with our current email marketing provider.”
• “I’m still waiting for IT to complete our CRM upgrade. I can’t ask them to start integrating [marketing automation software] as well.”
• “I’ve only just got my team trained on our CMS and email platforms, I don’t want to start training them on something new until we’ve got value from those.”
• “The US has bought [marketing automation software] but there’s no-one in the European office who has been trained on it so we’re still using our old software.”

Most marketing automation platforms displace some existing software, and at the high end have fairly significant training, IT, and consulting requirements.