Marketing Automation: What It Means for Sales

You may have heard the increasing buzz from your marketing department about "IMA", or "inbound marketing automation." But what exactly does it mean? And why all the hype?

To give you some context, inbound marketing is about optimizing the availability of your content.  Marketing automation refers to the use of technology to automate marketing tasks, such as lead tracking or scoring, and to distribute content to prospects based on their actions. For instance, if a prospect registers on your site and downloads a specific white paper, your marketing team can send related communications the prospect may also be interested in.

Together, you get inbound marketing automation (IMA).

So what are the implications of IMA for you and your sales force?

The goal of IMA is to enable marketing to help provide sales more qualified leads. Marketers can use it to track a customer's activity, and send more tailored communications based on materials prospects download or access from your site or emails over time. When the potential customer's actions indicate they have formulated a need and are ready to talk to a rep, marketing can alert sales to reach out to the prospect. 

While inbound marketing automation seems like a potentially useful tool to help sellers in opportunity identification, there are a few important things to keep in mind:

The value IMA creates depends on your working relationship with marketing. If you rarely collaborate with your current marketing team, IMA may lead to more stress and anxiety than qualified prospects. If you decide that IMA is right for your sales organization, first reevaluate your working relationship with Marketing. After all, you will both have to agree on the criteria that constitute a qualified lead and the lead scoring system.  ( SEC Members , to assess your current relationship with Marketing, use our Commercial Integration Diagnostic).
Inbound marketing automation largely operates in the world of established demand. IMA is about getting the customer to come to you when they have identified a need (or at least know they have one), and are ready to buy. Thus, the buying process is more than likely still going to happen on your prospect's terms.  IMA will help you get in before our infamous 57% arrow, but how much earlier may vary.
Automated content marketing is not a substitute for sharing of insights. Sure, you can forward white papers to potential leads, but there is a difference between delivering ideas via online articles and having a face-to-face dialogue where you share new insights, industry trends and personalized stories with a prospect.

So the bottom line is that yes, IMA could enable Marketing to better support your sales reps by identifying more quality leads in the realm of established demand (See last year's research on established vs. emerging demand opportunities). However, it's still up to sales people to analyze and prioritize prospect quality, especially in the ambiguous emerging demand space.

SEC Members, to learn more about pursuing opportunities in the emerging demand space, see the latest updates on our 2012 research which explores the pre-sale activities vital to creating demand.

What are your thoughts on marketing automation? Have you invested in this at your sales organization?