More on my interview with Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage. In this question, I ask Jim
“What kind of mistakes people make with marketing automation and what can they do to get more out of it in this economic downturn?”
Jim responds:
The first challenge is “What is this thing called marketing automation? How does it fit into my business?”
I read many, many years ago a British author who in 1977 asked, “Given my business, how should I use a computer” That’s fundamentally the wrong question. The question should be “Given the computer, how should I establish my business?”
Through re-engineering in the ‘90s and into the 2000′s, we’ve seen a lot of businesses evolve given the computer. I think we’re going through something similar with marketing automation. We start out and say well, given my need to generate leads, my marketing automation can help me generate and nurture leads.
But like the computer, there’s a better way to ask the question “Given marketing and automation technology and what it can do, how should I be setting up and executing both my marketing and sales programs?”
That’s the right way to think about marketing automation. Rethink how you execute your sales and marketing programs.
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Collaborator, is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation made simple” and author of the famed white paper, How to Find New Customers. He’s been called the guru of lead generation and Find New Customers helps businesses execute lead generation programs to excel at acquiring new customers.
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Jeff Ogden
Jeff,
Thanks for sharing your interview with Jim Burns. I love his analogy and conclusion… you won’t get results by just bringing in automation technology. You have to take a step back, and based on your objectives identify what changes are required to leverage the benefits of marketing automation.
Great technology is useless if you don’t have the right processes in place to take advantage of it.
Rhonda
marketinginsights.elqoua.com
Hi Jeff,
Technology is deployed in the workplace usually for one or more of the following reasons:
1. It improves productivity (effectiveness and efficiency)
2. It automates some processes and thereby improves efficiency
3. It enables you to accomplish things not economically possible through manual efforts
Marketing Automation can fundamentally change how marketing works because of #3 and Jim was alluding to this in his comment about how to set up marketing in a world powered with marketing automation. The reason the change can be so fundamental is that we could not economically achieve 1:1 marketing (remember Rogers and Peppers) without some form of automation. B2C has had the economies of scale to do this for some years. THe new wave of marketing automation systems is making these techniques available to B2B marketers. Fun times!
-Kevin Joyce
Market2Lead