Last night I had the opportunity moderate a panel of some of the smartest people I’ve met in the marketing world. It was at the monthly dinner meeting of the SDMA, www.sdma.org, on whose board I sit. The topic was Where Art & Technology Meet: SaaS for Marketers and the panel included Kathleen Brush, CMO of WebTrends, Bill Patterson, Director of Product Management at Microsoft, responsible for the upcoming launch of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, Steve Gershik, Director of Marketing Innovation for Eloqua and Blake Matheny, CTO for Compendium Blogware.
Kathleen opened the discussion with the point that the SaaS, software as a service, or on-demand, has democratized marketing technology and made it available to a far broader class of marketing organizations than the Fortune 500 type enterprise with a lot of resources, larger budgets and deep IT support. Bill added that it wasn’t just the SaaS model, but the expansion of the business applications offered to today’s marketers, regardless of whether it is delivered in a hosted, on-premise or completely outsourced manner.
When I asked the panel what advice they would give marketers evaluating various technologies, service providers and professional services companies, Steve cautioned that buyers should ask for references, make sure what service and support is offered and understand what the true cost of ownership is. On that theme, Blake reminded all of us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Even those companies advertising low monthly service fees, no contracts and no set up charges, do not allow you to get away without spending some serious money and making a real business commitment.
Once you’ve chosen a provider and a business application platform there are definite costs associated with training, support, customization and potentially significant costs to switch to a different platform down the line, when your business needs change. Always factor in not only what your business requirements are today, but what happens if you grow, contract or move in a different direction.
Finally, the panel tackled the question of how or if you should try to integrate multiple “best-of-breed” solutions or go with a single vendor and their “integrated” solution. The consensus was that first, look under the hood to make sure claims of integration are real. Often companies enhance their offerings by buying other companies and then claiming that simply because two products share the same logo, they can now claim to be integrated.
I am of course biased in this regard, because my company Ascentium, has made its mark by being both a marketing and a technology company. We can help our clients tackle the issue on several fronts, by integrating best of breed solutions like Microsoft CRM, WebTrends for analytics, Exact Target for email, SharePoint for content management and Performance Point as the robust BI tool that brings them all together and delivers on the promise of closed loop marketing. Or if the client wants a simple, easy to deploy, Swiss army knife solution, we fully embrace Eloqua and the best marketing solution available. And for those clients who don’t want to take on anything themselves, we can provide the above solutions as a fully outsourced service.
In the end, we got great feedback from the 100 some attendees of the event and I want to personally thank all of the panelists and invite them to join this discussion, either to add any points I left out, correct any mistakes I may have made or simply continue the discussion for a larger audience.
Feb 08, 2008 @ 18:40:49
Finding the right marketing automation solution for your company is important, but it is only solving part of the problem. The bigger part of the problem here is the data that you put into the marketing automation system. No matter how much the engine (Marketing Automation System) is perfected, it will not run well if the fuel (the DATA) is sewage.
Are we still, in 2008, renting “sewage lists” and them pumping them though these marketing automation processes? Most list vendors sell or rent title-based B2B contact lists. The problem is that a person’s title is only an appellation of rank, it has very little to do with the person’s roles and responsibilities in an organization. Say the buyer of your product is typically a Director of IT. Someone comes to your site and accurately fills out a form that they are the Director of IT. Hooray, you got ‘em. But wait, at IBM there could be 150 directors of IT; how do you know this is the one responsible for network security and has budget authority?
Just yesterday, I was on a call with the VP of Marketing who had been at a few of the Marketing Automation vendor and she could not believe what ReachForce is doing. At several past positions she set up her own inside telemarketing team to do contact discovery because she knew that title-based lists produces abysmal response rates. While this tactic had success, it was cost prohibitive to scale, manage and build. In her case she thought that there was no option but to do that as she did not want to use the sewage and be in 99% inaccuracy land.
Marketing Automation is a necessary tool for all marketers, but any one of these tools is only as good as the data put into it.
My point is that marketing automation is important but getting quality data or fuel to put into it is PRICELESS!!
Note: You may consider me biased, as I am the CEO of ReachForce, but my passion is to help marketers be more effective at their jobs and I truly believe that the root of the failure (or success) in most marketing campaigns comes back to the data.
Feb 10, 2008 @ 22:50:28
John, thanks so much for your concise summary of the evening and your masterful MC duties at the event. I learned a lot from the other panelists and the audience in attendence.
Kathleen made an important point when she said that Software-as-a-Service has democratized marketing technology, making it available to far greater numbers of marketers than ever before. Until 10 years or so ago, it was unthinkable for all but a Fortune 500 marketer to have access to marketing automation software.
But as any fan of Spiderman would tell you, “with great power, comes great responsibility.”
And this is where a lot of marketer’s make their mistakes — it is super easy to find SaaS solutions out there, and a lot of companies will get you started for low or no cost, particularly if they are a startup with no customers to speak of.
The problem comes when you’ve bought technology, get it installed and THEN try to figure out what you’re going to do with it. It’s important to sit down with your team and figure out what problems your technology is going to solve, and then sketch out a path to get from your current situation into your new, technology-enhanced process. Without that conversation taking place, you are likely doomed to fail.
As I mentioned during the talk, with marketing automation from Eloqua, I was able to achieve some great things in our demand generation efforts at the company I worked at before. But it was only after spending time with some really smart people at Eloqua (they weren’t yet teamed up with Ascentium at the time!), that we were able to map out our path to success.
So along with Suaad’s excellent point above, let me add:
Make sure you have the right people and processes in place before you start to automate with any SaaS solution.