Successful Marketing Automation Requires Buy-in from the Sales Team

Just read an interesting report on When to Adopt Leading Scoring, and How to Justify the Investment that was written by Emily W. Salus (@ewsalus), Sr. Marketing Manager, CollabNet, and published on Marketing Sherpa (@marketingsherpa).

Lead scoring is a subset of marketing automation systems designed to sort prospects from leads and deliver better qualified leads while refreshing the pipeline in an automated fashion. As Emily describes, "lead scoring enables you to assign a value (points) to the demographic characteristics (job title, revenue, geography, etc.) and activity (Web visits, email clicks, webinar attendance, collateral download, etc.) of the individuals who engage with your company." With this information, conceptually, marketers can segment, prioritize and provide qualitative information about a lead to the sales team.

Marketers have always struggled with the ability to measure, qualify, and justify ROI. And, these days, with so many prospect touch points, it has become increasingly difficult to measure the impact of any one marketing campaign, much less the cumulative affect of ongoing programs across multiple media platforms. Emily goes on to describe the significant effort involved in implementing such a scoring system and if it is a good fit for your company.

Personally, I believe that it is critical to attempt to measure the impact of our marketing campaigns however possible. But ultimately, success will be measured by the sales force in terms of results, or more specifically, increased sales.  And because of this, marketers needs buy-in from the sales team prior to deploying a marketing automation system so they are inclined to be proactive supporters and actively engaged in making the system work the way it was intended.