What Does Marketing Automation Mean to a CEO?

Posted by: Lisa Cramer | Posted on: August 4th, 2011 | 0 Comments

….nothing. That’s the answer – nice short blog isn’t it?  Well it’s not really that simple.

So yes, in reality most CEOs don’t care about the words “marketing automation”.  Do they care how the nurturing feature of the technology works? Do they care about scoring rule flexibility? Most likely not.

However, they DO care about things that grow a business such as opening new markets, moving beyond commodity selling, getting sales focused on high return items while driving low margin products/services through less expensive means, seeing ROI for lead generation dollars spent and so much more.  All of these should utilize marketing automation and more aptly lead management to make them a reality. Of course, marketing teams (along with outside companies like LeadLife) will develop strategy, define the process and implement technology together to deliver these business initiatives.

When we speak to CEOs and they want to understand how we deliver business initiatives to them or how we’ll help their organization deliver this business objective, we tell them that we have technology (marketing automation) to leverage.  This technology provides new insights and new capabilities to implement these strategies in a cost effective and timely manner.

The other thing that matters to CEOs in regards to marketing automation/lead management is the ability to realistically affect business.  With this uncertain economy, being cost effective and showing results in the short term is essential.  The business initiative might be to open a new market, yet the strategy would need to be implemented and measured in phases.   Maybe work is done first around how to build credibility in the new market (assuming the market definition is complete). What does that entail and how can you implement this with the resources available?  Layering the strategy, implementation and measuring the impact along the way is much easier to do today with marketing automation.

So if you’re a marketer and you want to start using marketing automation within your organization, discuss how the company’s business initiatives will be addressed by coupling technology with lead management process and strategy.