If you have been considering Marketing Automation for your organisation you are probably excited about what it could do for you, your marketing and your company’s ability to deliver and process inbound leads.
But how are you going to persuade your boss?
You need to understand your boss’s world. He (or she) is probably most interested in:
- Growing the business – hitting the numbers
- Customer satisfaction
- Competitors
And these are not always the easiest things to measure.
So, if you can present Marketing Automation as something that can bring more measurement and control of your lead generation efforts then you should get her (or his) attention.
You should explain that Marketing Automation will help by:
- Guiding your prospects through the buyer’s journey by giving them the right messages at the right time
- Measuring and reporting the effectiveness at each stage
- Lowering the costs of acquiring customers
- Shortening the sales cycle
- Providing higher average selling prices
Explain that Marketing Automation will essentially be setting up a big scalable marketing engine that will produce consistently measurable output of leads into the business. An engine that you can tweak and tinker with to bring about ongoing performance improvements.
Be realistic about timescales too.
Show them that you have done your research comparing the various Marketing Automation platforms. For instance, share a comparison of user reviews from G2 Crowd showing how users of each of the products rate their various platforms.
You should also point out that you are aware of the pitfalls.
You’ve done your research and you know what has gone wrong elsewhere. For example, in a recent study the biggest barrier to successful Marketing Automation implementation was lack of an effective strategy to begin with.
Updated February 2017
So, to mitigate this risk you can show that you would be going in with your eyes open. You know:
- That this is not just a piece of software – it will involve people, processes and technology
- People in the business will receive the appropriate training to ensure this is a success
- You’ve selected a trustworthy partner skilled in process automation
- You’ll be producing monthly reports automatically to monitor & measure success
You also need to tap into their concerns about the competition. How is your organisation going to stay a step ahead? What if your competitors are considering Marketing Automation already?
Pull together a few case studies of companies that have implemented Marketing Automation and then seen a marked increase in the closing rates of the leads produced.
Explain how scalabale this is, once you have tweaked, tested and proved. If you look at why companies get into Marketing Automation in the first place, make sure you cover these bases:
Updated February 2017
Who Else Needs Convincing?
Marketing Directors - 80% of marketing directors at top-performing companies say their most compelling reason for adopting Marketing Automation is to increase sales, and 76% say it’s to improve the quality of leads. (Gleanster, 2013).
So if you have to convince your Marketing Director (they should probably be on your side already!) then focus on case studies that highlight these aspects.
Sales Directors - The relationship between marketing and sales may be strained if marketing has historically delivered low-quality leads. Marketing Automation can help you to open conversations about sales and marketing alignment.
Talk about the quality of leads and explain how the cost per lead is likely to drop as your Marketing Automation manages leads better and nurtures prospects not yet ready to buy.
IT Directors - Typically, the Marketing Automation software platform is going to be hosted in the cloud. So your IT director is likely to have a few questions around security and implementation.
How exactly is all your data going to get into the new platform? Are you going to clean it up before you move it? Who will oversee the security of the system? And how much ongoing demand will this bring to the IT department?
Ask the software provider or the agency that you are working with to give you the answers to some of these questions.
Hopefully that will give you some good ideas about how to win over your boss (and colleagues) and to win your argument for making Marketing Automation part of your Marketing mix.
If you’d like to know more about Marketing Automation and inbound marketing download our free e-book now.
