Considerations for Purchasing Marketing Automation

Selecting Your Marketing Automation Software

With a number of excellent choices among today's marketing automation vendors, how do you make the right choice for your business? Many companies are going to the old tried and true software RFP approach for sourcing and selecting a solution. At The Pedowitz Group, we recommend this approach ONLY as part of an overall process designed to help you choose the solution that best fits your needs. Building Use Cases, as the other key part of your buying and decision making process, is the most effective way for a company to determine which MA system will work best for you.

While RFPs can provide a foundation for low level comparisons, it really comes down to how this technology will create an effective demand generation program for your organization.

When building your Use Cases, remember to:

1. Describe your power user. If you need to get things done quickly, with a slim staff, you might consider systems that are easy to learn and use. Also consider who will back up your power user. If your power user leaves the company and no one else has been trained on how to use the system, your momentum will screech to a halt.

2. Map out the life of a lead in your company. This will give you a good idea of what your marketing automation system will need to do and with what systems it needs to integrate. This process will provide important details on your CRM integration requirements.

3. Define your Lead Management System. How will leads be passed to sales and what kind of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will be put into place for sales and marketing?

4. Define the kinds of campaigns you will execute. Global or U.S. only? Will you use templates, dynamic content, triggers, lead nurturing, etc.?

5. Define the key metrics you will track.

Based on the above activities, fully vet three to five Use Cases with envelope ROIs. Remember - those 'feature' comparisons will only get you so far. To truly understand what you need in a marketing automation system, take the time to evaluate and build comprehensive Use Cases. These will also serve as your ROI justification to your executive committee during the decision making process.

And when you involve sales in the process of building your Use Cases – which you should – you will have early and active buy in from your primary constituent!

See the Spotlight article, The LASER Approach, to gain a  a holistic approach to sourcing and selecting the right marketing automation platform.