Marketing Clique

To preface my argument I want to start with three points:

1. Growing companies face many online marketing struggles. And one of the challenges is on whom they should be focusing their marketing and sales efforts.
2. Most companies think their baby their product is very, very important is strategic. But that's rarely the case. Most of the time it's tactical. Occasionally it's both strategic and tactical.
3. One of the cliché recommendations that management likes to chirp is, "We need to be selling higher in our prospect organizations. We need to get more sales meetings with the C-level." The trouble is that most products aren't sold at the C-level. They may require sign off from the C-level, but the decision making is happening at other levels. Decision-making happens over time. And many people are in on the decision-making process. Actually, this is a fundamental reason why marketing automation works.

A recent blog post from Marketing Automation Software entitled, Why the Marketing Automation Market Is Floundering & 5 Fixes to Fuel It is another example of a strategic thinker making a recommendation that doesn't quite fit. The author, Jeff Pedowitz' first recommendation for fixing what he describes as a "floundering" market is to sell over the marketing department because they don't have the budget.

I don't agree that the marketing automation market is floundering. The fact is that the top two marketing automation leaders (Marketo and Eloqua) are experiencing impressive growth and attracting real investment. Ancillary companies, like ReachForce, are also experience growth on the coat tails of marketing automation.

And secondly, I think Pedowitz' recommendation to sell beyond or over marketing is incomplete logic. As an example, everyone is interested in their computer working, it's mission-critical, and affects core revenue-generating departments within a company. But that doesn't mean you sell to the CEO. Instead, you sell to the IT Director and make additional resources available to the other parts of the organization, people in charge of due diligence, IT steering committees, or whatever.

One of the positive, yet sometime unanticipated outcomes of installing marketing automation software is more alignment between sales and marketing. Marketing and sales have always enjoyed a love-hate relationship, but now marketing is increasingly being held accountable for helping to drive revenue. Sales recognizes why this is important. And that's why both marketing and sales are involved with the decision to implement a revenue performance management system.

Marketing automation salespeople need to keep selling to the marketing executive. And marketing automation is clearing not "floundering."

Ultimately, both sales and marketing will get pulled into the decision-making process. And the CEO will sit up and take notice if the investment of budget and time is noteworthy. But I can practically guarantee you that it will be both the marketing and sales leaders that will continue to be the most influential people in the marketing automation purchase process.