A colleague asked me to compare and contrast what marketing automation deployments we’ve seen prospect and customer wise – what their use case is relative to the gap with best practices.

To execute on a need he had committed to a client, I came up with the following list for him to consider.

Symptoms of enterprises struggling with marketing automation – marketing automation has (been):

• Referenced internally as a ‘Ferrari in the garage collecting dust’
• Perceived as a ‘black box’ to non-marketing executives who don’t understand its impact
• Delivered a ‘Batch and Blast’ or large quantity of email experience, alienating subscribers
• Enabled a first generation lead scoring model that has little, if any, business impact
• Amplified non-standardized CRM data, thus frustrated sales and marketing users
• Underutilized relative to installed customer base

What marketing automation should be or do potential wise:

• Improves conversions by keeping in touch with not now, maybe later buyers
• Delivers relevant and targeted personalized content to end users to engage at the right time vs. all of the time
• Accelerates reporting ability when working properly with CRM, thus is transparent value vs. black box value
• Minimizes non-standard data to maximize deliverability impact
• Enables inside sales and sales prioritize workload via effective lead scoring model
• Provides cross sell /up sell capabilities to an installed base

I think a better question to ask in framing this entire situation is around the use case – what is the business problem you are trying to solve with marketing automation?  From that point with the end in mind, marketing automation can then be deployed and configured to address your business needs vs. deploying against its technical capabilities.

What do you think?