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Closing The Marketing Automation Skills Gap

It’s a magic moment when you’re a kid, seeing your first two-wheel bike. So shiny, so perfect…and then it dawns on you that you have absolutely no idea how to ride it, and there might be injuries. The marketing equivalent of a new bike is your marketing automation platform (MAP). It’s technology with significant promise to make demand creation more efficient, effective and accountable, but it’s not always easy. Many companies who implement a MAP find that nowhere near all of the features available get used and it has nothing to do with technology. The plain truth is all the cool features in the world can’t help if you don’t have the skills and processes to use them once you go live. Everyone needs to know how to ride a bike (or use MAP), some will be better at it than others, and it takes practice. Your first step toward successful implementation is to prioritize what skills and processes you need to take advantage of the technology you have.

Here are four areas of skills and process required to get the most out of marketing automation to consider. For each one, rate yourself and think about how your marketing execution would be enhanced if you could improve it:

• Database Management: Do you have a trusted, opt-in database that is kept clean and up-to-date? Do you know where data comes from in your organization? Can you use the data to track and report on valuable metrics? Data is the foundation of quality marketing, and by extension no marketing automation will deliver to its full potential if the data it uses is sub-par.
• Lead Management: Do marketing and sales agree on the definition of a lead, and is that what your MAP is set up to deliver? Do you know how to nurture leads to identify address key knowledge inflection points? Does your scoring go beyond just budget-authority-need-timeline (BANT)? Can you recycle leads that fall out of the sales process? If you use technology to automate ineffective processes, you cannot expect improved results. This area is the most critical for marketing and sales alignment as well.
• Campaign Management: Does your team understand how to structure multi-touch campaigns that support a customer-driven buying cycle? Being more effective at one-off campaigns will not allow you to leverage MAP’s full potential. Another process to cultivate is campaign interlock, which is the marketing equivalent of air-traffic control. Quality MAP use requires making sure the customer’s in-box is not flooded with too many messages, even when technology makes them easier to send. One obvious point here is also to know what your MAP tool can do-if you don’t know you have a feature, you definitely not going to use it. Look to your vendor for examples of what they consider the most effective deployments and see what new tricks you can learn.
• Web Skills: Do you know how to optimize every element in your campaigns? Can you leverage MAP to monitor what your prospects are doing? All roads lead online in one way or another, and your team needs to know how to manage the on- and off-ramps as well as the stopping points.

If you focus on developing skills and processes to leverage the MAP technology you have, then do-more-with-less is more than a tired Dilbert cartoon caption. It’s a way to develop your team and your productivity, and it won’t hurt nearly as much as falling off that first bicycle.

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