If you’re reading this you’re interested in implementing a Sales and Marketing Automation solution, or parts of it like tools for SEO/PPC, Demand Generation, Reputation Management Analytics or CRM. Complex, isn’t it? Powerful too, but all these pieces make it difficult to understand and evaluate your options. You may be wondering how you choose from among the many alternatives.
Perhaps you can glean something from the way we went about designing our own, for I’m sure your goals are similar. We wanted to design, build and then offer the world’s best Sales and Marketing Automation Solution (SAMA). Faced with the long list of potential suppliers of the various tools one needs to automate sales and marketing efficiently, we, too, paused. Our end-to-end solution uses software from 4 vendors, plus our own. And for each tool, there was a long list of bewildering features to comprehend and compare.
Here’s how we did it the first time. We analysed a typical B2B company’s needs, (this analysis became our Readiness Questionnaire), calculated the potential upside to see if it was worth it (and this analysis became our ROMI Calculator), and planned the project to implement our Sales and Marketing Automation solution. What we call the SAMA Roadmap. Then we compiled a list of technologies, researched available options and created an evaluation matrix of competing technologies. We listed all the features we felt were needed. Then talked to the suppliers, watched demos and asked questions so that we could score each tool for each of the cells on the matrix. Weighted each factor for importance, and then did our analysis. It took me 2 months of long days to complete our matrix for a pared down list of the Demand Generators on the market. (11 vendors).
And then we repeated the same process for each of the components we needed to provide our total solution of SEO Tools, Reputation Management, Demand Generation and CRM components. With all these pieces in place, we learned how to use them, studied their programming interfaces (APIs), and then designed our custom Inbound Marketing Dashboard and the software we needed to integrate them all together.
It took two of us – one an experienced marketer and the other an equally seasoned software developer – half a year to do this, by the way.
Oh yes. If you’d like a copy of the evaluation matrix, contact me. Not with results in it, of course, but a blank form so that you can do your own.
Bit-by-Bit #2
