(Reposted from DemandGenReports Blog)

When I recently attended Oracle’s Marketing Cloud kickoff event, where Oracle COO Mark Hurd gave his presentation to 100 of us, we had a chance to ask him questions at the conclusion. My question for him was, “how are you using Eloqua internally, what is your use case and roadmap vision?”

There were multiple use cases shared for marketing automation, each requiring different elements from their CRM or end users depending on the type of company. Let’s take a look at three of those models.

Model 1: Share of Wallet – Hurd said Oracle already has 400,000 global accounts, and doubted that he could expand that to 800,000. However, given that Oracle has been acquiring companies rapidly, Hurd said his objective now is to infuse other Oracle products into the company’s existing 400,000 client base via his newly acquired company, Eloqua.

For large, global enterprise companies, marketing comes down to the share-of-wallet, and gaining more spend from existing clients with products other than the core product. It’s about nurturing the relationships you already have, finding out what products they’re missing within the vendor portfolio, and working to expand the size of the accounts. In each of these scenarios, having the proper product information structured properly in the CRM system is critical and an often overlooked area. Duplicate accounts or contacts, sometimes caused by ERP systems, crush a marketer’s ability to properly upsell and cross sell.

Model 2: Market Share – Smaller organizations, by contrast, are typically concerned with gaining rapid market share. Their marketing efforts are more top-of-the-funnel oriented, with efforts aimed at expanding their client base. For SaaS companies in particular, they may extend offers, trials, and freemiums via marketing automation, dripping those freemiums into qualified opportunities at the right time. It is critical to set up the campaign integration with CRM properly in this scenario as well as a consistent campaign naming hierarchy such that campaign performance can be later analyzed to see what campaigns are driving conversions.

Model 3: Customer retention – Customer retention is a function found in both large organizations and in smaller SaaS companies. It’s oftentimes overlooked by marketers who prioritize how much revenue is being sourced or influenced.  CRM information on current contracts and products are critical, and are the ideal fields that indicate product usage so that nurturing can be based off renewal dates or usage (or lack thereof). Of the enterprises I’ve inspected, this area has the most upside potential for marketers to impact, yet it is very challenging for marketers to measure overall effectiveness.

There are a number of different ways marketing automation can be shaped to solve business challenges in the enterprise. What are you seeing?