In our recent webinar, Why you’re right to be hesitant about sales and marketing automation, Mogrify’s Melanie and Thomas Unwin, alongside SharpSpring’s Scott Earnest identified four common reasons why automation fails – and countered these with four tips to maximise success.
Why most companies fail at automation…
While 96% of marketers have implemented a Marketing Automation Platform, research reveals that the majority of companies quit using it after 12-18 months, citing lack of benefits, and difficulties with implementation and personalising content. This is particularly concerning as many of the big players in the automation game have 12 (sometimes 24) month lock-in contracts, so you’re left paying for a platform you stopped using 6 months ago.
Key reasons why automation fails are as follows
1 – Bad data in!
Error-strewn data entry makes it impossible to derive benefits from automation. The warning signs of bad data entry include contacts being added left, right and centre; custom fields added on demand; no real distinction between data that should sit on the organisation record versus that that should be on the contact record; and incorrectly executed import process.
2 – Unaligned sales and marketing teams
Many companies will be familiar with sales teams saying that all they want is “leads from marketing” – and with marketing teams focusing on vanity metrics such as email clicks or LinkedIn likes without considering how these relate to sales. Often, these differences are magnified because sales and marketing work on different platforms.
3 – Underestimating the complexity and work involved
This is the Big One – most organisations we know of vastly underestimate the complexity and work involved in automation. Red flags for this include using only basic functionality (e.g. website tracking), not adding opportunities to the pipeline, not adding relevant custom fields to the CRM, not building landing or offer pages in the platform and not activating email sync
4 – Overestimating short-term returns
Companies become frustrated that the platform hasn’t delivered the expected leads and that it isn’t providing the kind of reports they want. There’s an expectation too that the platform will use AI to mine information for them. But in reality, it’s the sales and marketing activity around the platform that delivers leads. Teams need to adhere to strict processes around the platform to ensure that the data coming out is meaningful.
Most companies might quit using automation within 12-18 months, but your company doesn’t have to be one of them!
Here are our four tips for automation success
1 – Start with clean data. Manage data integrity zealously
First up, appoint a database administrator and put them in charge of data architecture, custom fields, importing data and training others. Have them report to marketing rather than sales, to ensure the sales team don’t get carried away with enthusiasm and add superfluous fields.
Remove any contacts and companies that aren’t potential customers and budget time to prepare your first data set in a simple, two-tab Excel spreadsheet that everyone can understand. After that, tag contacts with clear buyer personas and link every contact record to an organisation record. Think about what belongs on a contact record versus an organisation record.
2 – Force sales and marketing together
Make clear to your sales and marketing teams that this is a sales and marketing platform. This is where everything gets recorded from now on and there’s no going back! Ask sales to enter all active opportunities into the platform’s pipeline and ask marketing to build reports that draw sales pipeline data, for example conversion funnels. Hold weekly sales and marketing meetings where results are discussed together.
3 – Treat your platform as a new ‘lo-code’ tool
Any platform is only as good as its users make it, so you need to make that clear to your team. Select people with a rudimentary understanding of how to sort and architect data to lead the roll-out – for example, someone who knows how to write complex formulas in Excel would be a good fit here. Give them clear, highly specific goals to work to, such as a monthly report showing success in converting opportunities at each stage of the sales pipeline, or an alert sent to the entire team every time someone fills in a website form.
4 – Manage your own expectations
Focus on the process as much as the end result. Check in on issues like whether your sales and marketing teams are becoming better aligned and whether there’s greater visibility into the sales pipeline. Remember, the platform itself won’t provide you with leads – it’s the activity around the platform, and the use of the platform, that will ultimately help with growth.
Get a partner involved
For a lot of SMBs, internally sourcing the capacity to manage the platform simply isn’t feasible, and the risk of investing in a single person for the role is major (if they leave, so does their knowledge).
Working with a partner can help you ensure have a smooth and thorough onboarding, you’re feeling comfortable with the platform, and you’re using it.
“Partnering with an agency is going to make your life a lot easier and save you money in the long run,” says Scott Earnest, account manager at SharpSpring.
Get in touch
Here at Mogrify, we love talking to businesses that are interested in embarking on the automation journey. We’re offering a one-month trial of the platform Mogrify has chosen to partner with, SharpSpring – HubSpot’s biggest challenger right now. If you’re interested in this opportunity, contact us here.
