The number isn’t exactly proportional to the conversation. Roughly 3,500 companies worldwide have adopted marketing automation programs, according to Jeff Pedowitz, president-CEO of The Pedowitz Group, a demand gen agency, who said that such programs started to proliferate in the late 1990s. “It still hasn’t gotten mainstream attraction, especially compared to social media alone, which has catapulted into a multi-billion-dollar industry in less than three years,” he said. FTL spoke to Pedowitz about some macro trends in marketing automation.
Follow the Lead: What are the biggest obstacles plaguing the adoption rate of marketing automation?
Pedowitz: I go back to an interview I read with Marc Benioff (Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com) when he was asked what was the secret of Salesforce.com’s success and he said, ‘You have to find the unifying metaphor.’ In Salesforce’s case, it was ‘The End of Software’ and everyone understood that intrinsically. I don’t think anyone has found the unifying concept for marketing automation yet, although they’re trying e.g. Revenue Performance Management, but I don’t think that is going to grab hold. So the vendors have to make the concept simpler and find a metaphor that gets peoples’ attention.
FTL: How can b2b companies improve their marketing automation efforts, particularly if they are strapped for budget?
Pedowitz: Doing more user-based content. Marketers put a tremendous pressure on themselves to write all of these white papers when they can take advantage of social media to drive more user-generated content, and that content can be tracked and set into their nurturing programs. That’s one of the biggest stumbling blocks to lead nurturing. [Companies] need to adopt more of an open philosophy of generating that content; it doesn’t all have to come from in-house.
FTL: Do you think b2b companies are allergic to b2c markets despite the opportunities they present in terms of cracking vertically integrated markets?
Pedowitz: There are a couple of challenges to going after the b2c markets. The first one is transaction-volume; the Web-site tracking that any marketing automation vendor does is very advanced and when you start compiling all of that data – combined with the email volume that most b2c companies use – it’s beyond the capabilities of even some of the most advanced marketing automation vendors on the market today. The top b2b focused vendors really max out at around 10 million contacts in the database, which is child’s play for a b2c company. And that’s a bigger part of the problem; technology infrastructure and tracking the load online. But it’s often b2c companies that are three to five years ahead of b2b companies, and [they] provide real-world examples of how marketing automation can work once you move away from the ‘brand,’ because for b2b it’s about driving revenue.
The Pedowitz Group recently acquired social media and social CRM consulting firm Metz Consulting. Financial terms were not disclosed. For the full release, please click here.
Thanks; that’s great insight from one of the first leaders in the field of B2B Marketing Automation.
I agree that “Revenue Management” sounds too CFO-related and is not anchored enough in the Marketing lexicon. My company uses “Data Driven Revenue” and that seems to click with people, but it’s a tagline, not a metaphor.
I believe there is a “unifying metaphor” for Marketing Automation, and it’s based on what has been around in the defense industry, which is clearly B2B or better yet B2G (government).
In what is known as “network centric warfare,” much emphasis is placed on creating a reliable, efficient system that gathers, stores, analyzes, and shares data which enables action.
In the case of defense, it enables action that advances or protects interests in a battlespace. In the case of our realm (the private, B2B sector), it fundamentally enables action that optimizes the chance of a sale.
Obviously, B2B marketers are not engaged in true warfare and recent events have called for language that does not allude to war/violence, but I submit that the application remains appropriate for metaphor, not necessarily rhetoric.
Company closings, product obsolescence, and job loss are the private sector’s equivalent of fatality in the battlespace, and those events can be tied to a company’s inability to adequately move data across the enterprise.
I used to frequently replace the defense industry phrase “network centric warfare” with “network centric marketing,” but we appear to be approaching the point where “network centric” is assumed.
But what really needs to improve before we all become “network centric” are the processes that enterprises use, online and offline, to get qualified leads into the hands of salespeople, or at least get buyers to place an order online for the more commodity-like B2B purchase.
So my long winded response to this excellent interview ends with the real metaphor -
In defense, the object of “network centric warfare” is also described as “sensor to shooter,” implying the remote device that relays real-time information to the “boots on the ground” shooter that pulls the trigger.
For us, we need to think “sensor” or “system to salesperson,” implying the application (email, social media, RFID, any interaction that can be transformed into a piece of online data which is relayed to the appropriate person that then begins to interact to a customer to bring a deal to a close.
So “System to Salesperson” is my two cents.
Hi Joe:
Thx very much for taking the time to comment; with a groundswell happening I’m betting the industry will eventually crack the code to make marketing automation more accessible and doable.
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