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THe Key to the Success of any Project is to Earn Executive Buy-In

Gaining executive buy in to the notion of Revenue Marketing is critical to the success of your program. This is not a "business as usual" expense and, in fact, often drives significant change across the organization, especially in sales and marketing. 

Adding marketing automation is the first step in building a Revenue Marketing Practice.  Executive buy in is paramount to success.  We've learned three key tips for selling executives on the value of marketing automation:

• Learn best practices for executing marketing nurturing campaigns. Better effectiveness here results in more qualified leads delivered to sales - which is what executives care about.
• Scale the number of campaigns you execute by many times.  Marketing automation enables your staff to act as if there are three to four more people working on programs.  Doing more - with less - gets an executive's interest.
• Track every outbound and inbound interaction with propsects and link opportunities back to marketing influence. Prove the impact of marketing on sales results.

Provide statistics on what others in your industry, or similar size companies, are doing with MA to solve issues similar to yours. Put your business case in the context of sales - most companies are willing to spend money on the sales team, but more reluctant to spend on the marketing side. You'll go a long way towards getting executive buy in when you find out what their major initiatives are for the year and show them how MA can solve one - or more - of these.

Your ability to get executive buy in early is a critical component of success as you consider bringing marketing automation on board. Use Cases are a key tool to help you win executive buy in. 

See the Spotlight article, Building Use Cases, to learn what they are and why you need them to help engage your executives.