The Benefits of Marketing Automation

Now that we’ve covered the common features found in Marketing Automation systems and how they impact the Marketing and Sales Cycle, let’s look a little at what benefits you can enjoy from implementing these automated processes.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Succesful implementation of a Marketing Automation solution helps align Marketing and Sales department by increasing communication and transparency between departments. The inherent nature of a consolidate platform, tightly integrated with your CRM, provides measurable indicators on the quality and quantity of Leads being funneled to your Sales reps. In essence, you’re creating an automatic feedback-loop. Since the entire process is fully automated, the quality and quantity of Leads being funneled can be adjusted by Marketing at any time, as per the Sales organization’s needs. The days of throwing Leads over a wall and letting Sales fend for themselves are essentially over, once you’ve implemented such a program.

Better Insight in to What Works (and what doesn’t)

By virtue of the consolidation of the Lead-to-Sales funnel under one roof, Marketers benefit from having clear insight in to what part of the chain is working and what isn’t. And as with any assembly-line-like process, a simple tuning at any step in the line will have an impact at later stages. When your marketing process are automated, the tasks of “tweaking the system” becomes much easier and much easier to measure.

A measurable process enables Marketers to no longer be viewed as a cost-center. Marketing accountability is now transparent, because every step of the Sales cycle is now easily viewable and measurable.

Reduce Operating Costs

This is of course what draws marketers in to implementing a Marketing Automation platform in the first place, because we are all trying to answer the question, “How do I decrease costs and increase efficiency?”

The reduction of labor costs is a byproduct of any automated system. The reduction of costs is brought on primarily by two broad concepts:

• Decreased labor cost, by automating the process of qualifying/routing leads and measuring the effectiveness of campaigns and programs.
• Increased Efficiency, By automating tasks and focusing Sales on quality Leads, thereby eliminating waste (lost time/resources) within the system.

Special care must be taken when selecting a vendor that the offset costs of labor don’t translate in to an increased cost of licensing their product and adding headcount to manage it (or consultants to instruct you on how to manage it.

« How Marketing Automation Works