Sales Prospecting Perspectives

High Sales Efficiency Expectations with Marketing Automation [Infographic]

  

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Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Brian Hansford, Director of Client Services and Marketing Automation Practice at Heinz Marketing.

Demand generation has dramatically evolved from activity-based contact marketing to a core strategic function in organizations.  Marketing Automation is a leading force in this evolution, and B2B marketers are rapidly increasing their acumen to provide a direct impact to revenue generation.  But ROI results don’t come quickly, and they’re often hard to measure.    

Heinz Marketing and OnTarget Consulting completed the 2014 Marketing Automation Effectiveness and Performance Survey and we developed this infographic to share the results.  Survey data is on SlideShare.  

Some Survey Takeaways:

Measuring Sales Performance – The two biggest areas marketers want improvement with Marketing Automation platforms is pipeline reporting and improving sales effectiveness.  Survey results show Marketing Automation is very important to the organization in these areas, but may not always meet the high expectations in time to deliver and value.  

Revenue Accountability – As marketers increase their skills and utilization with Marketing Automation, it’s clear they want and are expected to show impact on revenue generation.

Sales Alignment – Marketing Automation success relies heavily on alignment with sales.  Survey respondents provided these statements to back it up:

• “Marketing Automation has been built into a core component of our marketing and sales strategies. It enables us to achieve greater alignment of marketing and sales initiatives by strengthening message consistency, increasing lead qualification, and providing better visibility into campaign effectiveness.”

• “Marketing Automation is deeply ingrained in our sales and marketing organizations, as much as Salesforce.com is. That system must work for our teams to be successful.”

• “Without our Marketing Automation efforts, we cannot support our company's goals and help drive leads to build sales results!”

Here are the results of the 2014 Marketing Automation Effectiveness and Performance Survey:

Brian Hansford is an account director and marketing automation practice leader at Heinz Marketing.  Prior to joining Heinz Marketing, Brian was the CMO at Zephyr 47 providing marketing automation and content strategy services for B2B tech companies. Brian brings passion and focus to strategic marketing by following a comprehensive planning approach and ensuring brilliant execution and measuring the results. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn, and visit his website here.