Keys to B2B Marketing Automation Success: Experts from IDC and Quaero Weigh In

Our recent “Keys to B2B Marketing Automation Success” webinar was a great opportunity to discuss best practices in marketing automation implementation, standardizing critical customer data, and maximizing KPIs for marketing and sales alignment. Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek from Quaero and Gerry Murray, IDC’s CMO Advisory Service research manager, both contributed great perspectives on marketing automation adoption and keys to driving cross-channel campaign success.

Gerry kicked off the discussion, presenting both marketing and sales points of view on marketing automation adoption. It was interesting to see his representation of what the sales pipeline looks like before marketing automation and the vast improvements organizations experienced post- implementation, including increased pipeline performance, deal size and revenue.In outlining the key factors to marketing automation success, Gerry pointed to integrating data, workflows and governance across the whole “response to revenue cycle” as the most critical, with the following four recommendations for marketers to consider in order to succeed:

• Standardize your customer data;
• Review key performance indicators (KPIs) for marketing and sales to ensure alignment, visibility, and data integrity;
• Support the marketing operations role;
• Consider the evolution path into sales enablement.

Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek then discussed one of the key elements of marketing automation success – the data foundation. She talked about the six dimensions of marketing performance, with data and technology dimensions being the most critical. Using real-world examples, she was able to show attendees how marketing automation can help build a comprehensive view of customers and interactions, cleaner customer data, a platform that supports growth and prospect list management capabilities, and more reliable contact data.

She also outlined the key critical steps to marketing automation success, including defining your customer, cleansing and standardizing your data, matching your customers, and creating a “master” record.

By doing this, Michelle stated that marketers will be able to not only identify gaps in customer information and decrease marketing expenditures and waste, but also improve the quality and deliverability of campaigns, differentially invest in customer segments based on value, and improve the return on marketing investment.

Here are some additional takeaways from the webinar I thought were important to share:

• Start with a good data foundation;
• Automate conversations across inbound and outbound channels;
• Be sure to map your marketing and sales processes to the automation tool/technology that you select to give you the flexibility you need;
• Essential elements of your solution: Plan, automate, track, measure, and report;
• Make sure that your solution helps you throughout the entire marketing life-cycle to drive revenue that you can attribute to marketing. Because of course, it’s all about the revenue.

In short, marketing automation has proven to be a valuable tool in automating those critical 2-way conversations with prospects and customers in order to drive revenue. Because at the end of the day, the bottom line… is the bottom line. We can talk about customer experience and automation, but in reality, all marketers really care about is revenue.

To access the full webinar playback, click here.

What are your B2B marketing automation success tips or best practices?