This post is in response to Bob Warfield’s excellent article Marketing Automation Consolidation

A wonderful article, very thoughtfully written – thank you…

As a professional Marketing Automation Consultant, I too have my own reservations about what some companies can achieve.  My reservations however, are not with the capability of the MA systems. I generally evangelize the ultimate harmony of marketing and sales through the implementation of both MA and SFA. That being said these two systems can be brought into an environment as separates, providing lead management (SFA) for sales, and Demand Generation (MA) for marketing, long before any talk of integration, lead scoring, or web behavior analytics comes into play. 

The lag in this total integrated theory is always the quality of the marketing collateral and the depth of web content you need to optimize any potential scoring system you have in mind.  To this end, rather than coming in and tearing down the marketing department, we provide a B2B sales tools and the sales lifecycle guide for download that illuminates the necessary documents and marketing tools needed at each stage of the sales cycle. This speaks directly to Bob’s point about serving the customers online research. By helping our clients improve collateral and define the stages of the sales cycle we can improve demand generation effectiveness and bring sales and marketing closer together long before integration and lead score models come into the conversation.

I have found that with comprehensive marketing tools in place, outside of event management (unless the event is already canned), fully automated marketing campaigns are not just possible but relatively easy to create. These campaigns can run for many months needing only periodic review for new product and document updates.  

From this vantage point final integration and lead score based qualification gets much more focused and is much easier to demonstrate. AKA the totally integrated solution.

As to Bob’s knock on Social Media integration, here again the problem is not the MA solution but rather the company’s own effective use of the social medium. I find that very few companies even realize that Facebook pages can be easily customized to embed registration opportunities and tracked as a source. Same goes for using twitter or linked in as a lead source. So there is no dearth of methods for tracking these and inserting the leads directly into your automated campaigns. Just a lack of understanding that surrounds Social Media in general.

With this type of staggered approach to implementation the end benefits are more easily realized; Marketing, proving value and providing more, more qualified leads, and sales having a better view into not just better leads, but also groups of leads from prospect companies coalescing and gathering information to support an evaluation or purchase decision.

All this heavy lifting and optimization on the marketing side pre-integration suggests that even if consolidation occurred, nothing would change accept the name on the MA solution. i.e. there would be no advantage to offering both sides of the solution without reliance on the same legion of consultants to bring the company up to speed. Furthermore, SalesForce current support of third party solutions through their App network is more advantageous to SalesForce and its customers than would be any level of MA solution that SalesForce could offer.

In other words, just in the same way that SalesForce created the Saas CRM space, they also have created the partner ecosphere that is the essence of the Saas model. Everyone else is going to find out that just as before, over consolidation and feature bloat will lead to extinction ( see Seibel, Documentum, ect…).

Feel free to call me for more information and take advantage of our free consultation.

Marc King
Lead Consultant
Demand Genesis
408-250-2390

The free B2B Guide download is available on site at www.DemandGenesis.com

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