The Easiest Way to Get Started with Marketing Automation? Answers in the Pictures.

Here’s more proof that the apocalypse is near: I’ve discovered the “remove background” feature in Powerpoint. This makes it even easier for me to doctor photographs for my presentations. The fabric of reality cannot long survive so much stress.

The immediate subject of my attentions is next Tuesday’s Webinar “Marketing Automation: One Step at a Time”, sponsored by Act-On Software.

The dominant image of this Webinar, and the eponymous white paper (available on the RaabGuide web site), is a high stone wall representing the effort required to deploy a marketing automation system. More specifically, the wall represents the effort of a traditional best-practice approach, which requires reviewing all marketing processes, designing new programs, creating new content, and working out alignment with sales. It’s a high wall indeed, and many companies just can’t climb it.

As I wrote in a post last December, several strategies have emerged to deal with this challenge. Now I’m delighted to be able to illustrate them.

Training: The wall is high but marketers can learn to jump higher. What they need is training in the pole vault.

Ease of use: Let’s lower the wall so marketing automation is easier. Apply a jackhammer to knock it down a few feet.

Incremental deployment: Break the deployment process into small, manageable stages. Let’s add a staircase with someone taking baby steps.

Service: Marketers should let specialists do the heavy lifting. The experts can carry them over the wall with a crane.

You’ll be pleased to know that the focus of the Webinar isn’t my new-found graphic capabilities. It’s how to succeed at incremental deployment, the strategy recommended by Act-On. Without giving too much away, the key is starting with the right tasks so you get some immediate benefit and build a foundation for future growth but don’t take on too much at once. Yes, I have some specific suggestions…but you’ll have to tune in to hear them.

Are We Making Marketing Automation Harder Than Necessary?

Summary: Is stressing the need for process change making marketing automation too complicated, or a recognition of what it really takes for success? Vendors take both sides of the argument. So did Aesop: see The Tortoise and the Hare.

Act-On Software officially relaunched its system earlier this week, offering a new interface and a new positioning. The interface is perfectly nice but the positioning is ultimately more important. The company’s press release puts the key claim succinctly: “The Act-On Integrated Marketing Platform disrupts the conventional wisdom that companies need marketing automation solutions that are expensive, complex, and require significant services engagements to get them up and running.”

I’m not sure that whoever speaks for “conventional wisdom” would agree that marketing automation solutions must be expensive and complex. My own position (loosely paraphrasing Einstein) is it should be as complicated and costly as necessary, but not more.

However, the real meat of that statement is the third item: “significant services engagements”. This refers to the idea that marketing automation must accompanied by comprehensive planning and process engineering, which often require external assistance. The oracles of conventional wisdom would probably agree. I know I do.

Act-On begs to differ. Their belief, outlined to me in January by Sales VP Shawn Naggiar and CMO David Applebaum, is that most marketers just want to get things done immediately with existing resources. Of course, no one could argue with that – we all want something for nothing. The real question is whether marketing automation can actually deliver value without marketers making a more substantial investment. Act-On is betting that they can, especially if aided by software that’s designed to make easy things simple. The company just received $4 million in funding from others willing to share the bet, on top of an initial $2.5 million.

It would be easy to dismiss Act-On’s proposition as something between wishful thinking and pandering, right up there with diet-free weight loss. But I’ve heard almost exactly the same argument recently from other vendors including Net-Results, Marketbright, and, to lesser extent, Genius.com. All cite the need for an intermediate step between the simplicity of email-only systems and the complexity of full-blown marketing automation. They see closing this gap as the critical requirement in spreading marketing automation to the masses, and as a great business opportunity for themselves. When so many smart people reach the same conclusion, it's worth serious consideration.

On the other hand, the vendors with the greatest success to date have stressed the importance of process. This is true not just at the high end of the market, but also at the low end, where Infusionsoft, OfficeAutoPilot and HubSpot all make huge efforts to educate and cajole their clients into using their systems fully.

Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot are selling to much smaller businesses than Act-On, Net-Results, and the new Marketbright. Still, it's interesting that vendors at both ends of the spectrum have found that process focus is essential. Maybe success requirements are really different in the middle – but I’d say the burden of proof is on those making that claim.

If I want to start a good argument, I should probably end this post here. Drawing clear battle lines between vendors who believe in process and those who don't should certainly prompt some response.

But that wouldn’t be fair to either side. The process-oriented vendors do strive to make it easy to get started, and the start-up-oriented vendors do expect their clients’ processes to mature over time. And, while Act-On, Net-Results, Marketbright, and Genius all argue that their systems are substantially easier to use than products like Pardot, Marketo and LoopFuse, those vendors surely disagree. My own (fair but wimpy) opinion is that there are significant differences among individual systems but neither group is generally easier or more powerful than the other. Users have to do the hard work of matching the system to their particular needs and style. Eat your spinach.

That said, the role of process is an important and worthwhile subject for debate. The greatest danger I see facing the B2B marketing automation industry is that it will develop a reputation for failure. This is exactly what happened to CRM systems when people started to think that simply purchasing one was a guarantee of success. It took a long time and much hard work for the industry to overcome the stigma of the resulting failures. They have now established that careful planning and disciplined deployment are essential for clients to receive real benefits.

Perhaps we're doomed to repeat this history. It's the "trough of despair" in the hype cycle. But we can at least try to avoid it. My position is this: marketers can start small with their automation systems, but they should still go into the project recognizing that real value requires substantial change. Ignoring this reality is bad for everyone.

Eloqua Adds Free Implementation Offering

On Monday, Eloqua announced a new free deployment service for its clients. This is part of a larger industry trend to offer free deployment. It follows last month’s free deployment offer from Eloqua reseller Pedowitz Group, which generated quite a bit of comment on this blog. The new service, called QuickStart, will also be delivered by Eloqua partners, giving them an opportunity to start a relationship that could lead to future paid business. Crafty.

Eloqua Senior Vice President Paul Teshima, who is in charge of post-sales support, said the new program includes system configuration, CRM data integration, setting up an email template, landing page, three-touch lead nurturing program and a lead scoring discussion. It is delivered remotely and can be completed in two days to two weeks, depending on how much time the client has available. Advance preparation involves filling out a survey and receiving (if not reading) simple documentation. Clients fill out a workbook during the sessions and are the consultant leaves behind a 90 day plan for future action.

Teshima said the new program was developed in response to customer requests for a fast way to get some immediate use from their systems. It is a subset of the company’s year-old SmartStart program, which take five days or longer but includes more extensive email set-up; data posting from an external Web form; deeper CRM integration including lead flow, activity-triggered sales alerts, lead assignment, and email opt-outs; creation of either a lead scoring or lead nurturing program; and several types of marketing assessments and planning. SmartStart involves on-site consulting and costs $3,000 to $8,000.

The difference in scope between QuickStart and SmartStart provides a useful reminder of the importance of digging into the details of vendor claims about deployment. The question isn’t whether it’s free or can be done in one day, but what’s included and how much your company must do in advance.

The reality is that a complete demand generation program is something you develop and expand over time. A good start is important but it’s only a start.

Another reality is that most companies need help with improving their programs. Teshima pointed to Eloqua's customer success managers, who meet with each client quarterly to review system usage and develop a plan for improvements. They are compensated solely on retention rates, so their focus is on making better use of existing components rather than selling new licenses.

Eloqua also has its professional services group and consulting partners to provide more hands-on assistance. Other vendors also provide such services, either with their own own staff or through partners.

My point is to recognize that you’ll very likely want to purchase such services to get the most value from your demand generation investment. If that sounds like bad news, I guess you don’t absolutely need to. And while you’re saving money on that, you can also change your car’s oil and cut your own hair to save money on mechanics and stylists.

Sarcasm aside, a few companies already have skills to deploy a demand generation system effectively, but most do not. The reason you pay money for these systems is because they’ll help you do a better job. Not investing in the training and consulting means you’ll get less value than you should. Of course, you still need to invest wisely, in the sense of getting the right training and consulting. And, yes, you can probably get some value even without outside help.

Training and consulting are ultimately business decisions about where you can spend money to get the greatest return on your investment. A small investment in using your system effectively is likely to be a wise choice.

Demand Generation Deployment Survey: Preparation Saves Two Months

Summary: My survey of demand generation deployments found that some companies deploy many features immediately, while others take two or three months to reach the same stage. A fast start depends on ample preparation. A white paper on the Raab Guide site explores the results in detail.

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I finished my detailed analysis of the demand generation deployment survey results yesterday and posted it to the resource library of the Raab Guide site. This turned out to be a major project (the analysis, not the posting) because I revisited the data from a company perspective. The analysis in my earlier blog posts looked at average deployment rates by feature, without relating those to particular companies.

As often happens, averages gave misleading results. For example, one of the original factoids that most impressed me was that 80% of features ever deployed are deployed by the second month. This seems to suggest that people deploy quickly and then are largely done. But analyzing data by company, I found a very wide divergence in behaviors: some companies deploy nearly all features immediately, while others start very slowly.

Specifically, I grouped the companies into four quartiles, ranked by the number of features they deployed during the first week. This figure itself varied hugely, from 0.6 features per company in the lowest quartile to 8.8 features/company in the highest. But what I found is the companies who start with very few features will add them steadily over time, while the ones who deploy many features immediately quickly reach the maximum. So, that average of 80% deployment by the second month really is a combination of rates ranging from 57% to 97% for the different quartiles.

table 10 [table numbers refer to tables in the paper]
% of final features deployed by time period (companies stay in original quartile over time)
quartile	first week	first month	second month	third month	later
1 (tortoise)	0.05	0.32	0.57	0.72	1.00
2	0.28	0.55	0.70	0.77	1.00
3	0.49	0.76	0.84	0.86	1.00
4 (hare)	0.68	0.93	0.97	0.97	1.00
average	0.39	0.66	0.80	0.84	1.00

In other words, we have a classic tortoise vs the hare race, with some fast starters and others moving slow but steady. Looking at the number of features per company rather than percentages, we see the tortoises (quartile 1) never quite catch up, but do greatly narrow the gap.

table 9
average features per company by quartile (companies stay in original quartile over time)
quartile	first week	first month	second month	third month	later
1 (tortoise)	0.6	3.4	6.1	7.7	10.7
2	3.0	6.0	7.7	8.3	10.9
3	5.6	8.7	9.7	9.9	11.5
4 (hare)	8.8	12.0	12.6	12.6	12.9
average	4.5	7.6	9.2	9.6	11.5

My fundamental interpretation is that the companies who deploy many features immediately have done their homework and are ready to go from day one, while those who start slowly did little advance preparation. The figures above suggest it takes the tortoises about three months to approach the initial deployment levels of the hares - so it seems this is the length of the delay from lack of preparation.

I actually tightened the analysis even more by looking separately at deployment rates for basic, advanced and optional features within each quartile. (Basic features are needed for simple email campaigns; advanced and optional features are more complex and less common. The paper describes the definitions in detail.) Looking just at the basic features, you'll see they're deployed sooner than average, and that even the tortoises finish implementing them by the second or third month. (You'll also note that, even among basic features, the tortoises never quite deploy as many as the hares.)

table E-1
cumulative features deployed by quartile (based on first period rank)
% of final features deployed by period							average features deployed
quartile	feature category	first week	first month	second month	third month	later
1 (tortoise)	basic	0.10	0.53	0.85	0.93	1.00	4.4
2	basic	0.52	0.79	0.88	0.90	1.00	4.7
3	basic	0.71	0.88	0.92	0.92	1.00	4.8
4 (hare)	basic	0.84	0.98	1.00	1.00	1.00	5.0
avg		0.56	0.80	0.91	0.94	1.00	4.7

The paper draws a number of other conclusions from the data and makes some helpful if generic recommendations (select the right system, prepare in advance, plan for expansion, test and measure). That's all good stuff but far from world-changing. What's really interesting is the details themselves - go ahead and dig into the paper and see what you find.