Today’s  post comes courtesy of Jennifer Pockell-Wilson, Vice President of Marketing & Demand Operations  Demandbase.  I think you will find her advice helpful as you begin your efforts to “sell” marketing automation into your organization.

You and your team decided that now is the time to make an investment in Marketing Automation. You’ve played around with email and it’s left you wanting more. You want to measure marketing’s overall impact. You want to maintain consistency through your global demand generation efforts.

Now you have to sell your boss and the executive team on the investment. I have been in your situation before and found following proof-points were essential in getting executive buy-in on Marketing Automation.

1. Impact
Every revenue-focused executive needs to prove their team’s impact on driving growth. But this has traditionally been more challenging for Marketing Execs than for Sales, because the act of Marketing can be seen as abstracted from the act of revenue generation.  Your CMO may be in a constant state of defending the allocation of dollars to Marketing when the belts get tight and when annual planning happens.

Your CMO wants to demonstrate impact, which is only possible when an organization is speaking the same language. When Marketing Automation is properly connected to the transactional sales system, you can view the impact of marketing programs from that first hand-raise to closed business.  This allows your CMO to describe the incremental gain for every additional dollar invested and conversely, the negative impact of any reduction in program spend.

2. Efficiency
In a global marketing organization, maintaining a consistent brand image, tone and message through all direct marketing efforts can be tricky.  You need to allow for regional flexibility while enforcing requisite consistency to ensure that aforementioned impact.

Marketing Automation can simplify the process of maintaining this consistency through the use of common assets like email and landing page templates, and by providing a global center when successful tactics can be discovered, copied and localized with guidelines. Efficiencies are gained through the creation of geographic demand centers that can function as service arms for marketing automation efforts.  These centers are increasingly deployed along with Marketing Automation to provide the CMO a go-to resource.

3. Alignment
The alignment of Sales and Marketing toward revenue goals is the objective of every CEO. Marketing executives want to help salespeople create new business, accelerate deals through the pipeline and to increase closed business with stage-by-stage value-added marketing efforts. Marketing Automation can enable all of this.

The careful tracking of campaign success will help your CMO understand and communicate what’s working and what isn’t. When the impact to the bottom line is felt and when reps see marketing efforts helping them to close business… your CMO is a hero!

4. Measurement
Careful and proper measurement over time can turn the CMO into the exec to address predictive analytics.  The CEO may soon discover that the CMO is the best source of what the company should do to become more successful. One of my favorite CMOs often says, “Marketing is the new Finance.”  The ability to measure has been many marketing leaders’ a primary driver for adopting automation.

Jim Thomas jim@jcthomas.com
Director of Business Development
JC Thomas Marketing Communications