June 16, 2009

The Evolution of B2B Sales and Marketing Tools

Posted by Scott Rankin

I started my career as a Marketing intern about seven years ago and remember the days of server based CRM solutions, overly- complex applications to track web analytics and most importantly batch and blast email marketing tools that didn’t communicate back to Sales and Marketing.   Even though these technologies are still around, the adoption of B2B Marketers using integration solutions has significantly increased, especially for the smaller SMB and Corporate spaces.

It used to take me several hours to just manage and organize a webinar from a list located in the CRM database, combined with the webinar registration tools, and finally import the list into the email marketing solution for delivery. With the beauty of Marketing Automation tools and using APIs to route data to/from the CRM and Webinar applications we are finally able to automate these time consuming processes into a smooth running marketing engine that is very efficient and powerful. Your everyday marketing manager is able to handle a lot more campaigns due to the efficiencies found within these technologies.

Another great example of evolution is the follow up and routing of these newly cultivated leads from Marketing and ultimately the handoff to Sales. Gone are the days of going over a spreadsheet to see who is qualified for Sales and who isn’t. I used to take these spreadsheets and manually enter them into the database or sit with the Sales rep and educate them on what marketing activities this person did.

We are now able to develop a custom set of criteria that is relevant to the buying process and route the leads through the pre-defined logic based on a custom business process review and best practices. Once the lead or contact has reached a certain threshold based on the criteria above, the automated programs are able to push the data over to the CRM system for follow up and instantly notify the appropriate sales rep.   
    
My favorite example of this evolution is finally being able to link all of this data together and track the won opportunities back to the individual marketing efforts. This was technically possible a few years back, but the latest technologies have made this process easier to manage on a larger scale without a lot of effort. 

This is the second of a two-part series on the development of Marketing Automation technologies.

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