You know its October when the mornings get darker and damper, and the halls echo with whispered budget conversations. The budget debates in marketing invariably settle into two areas:
- Disagreement over budget allocation between marketing groups
- Disagreement over where the budget cut line should rest
There is never disagreement on the things that clearly have to be done, nor the things that are outrageous “nice to haves” destined for the circular filing cabinet in the corner of your office. Many of us are facing flat budgets or even reduced budgets in 2010 over 2009, and at the same time there is an expectation that the company can grow next year. This means that in order to add something new, like Marketing Automation Software, above the cut line, something else may have to move below the cut line. It is not sufficient to prove that Marketing Automation is worthy of being considered, you have to prove it is more worthy than something else! In addition, you have to posit that it can help you increase your results over prior years’ performance.
Which Marketing Automation results will drive company growth in 2010Mature marketing automation systems offer plenty of functionality for Inbound Marketing and for Outbound Marketing. If the bulk of the outbound marketing is in automated lead nurturing campaigns then consider that:
- CSO Insights reported that more deals closes faster, and more reps made quota when lead nurturing was involved
- Aberdeen reported that best in class companies who nurtured leads increased revenues by 28%
- Sirius Decisions’ finding that currently only 20% of Marketing leads receive Sales follow-up
So did last year’s budget spend of gazillions on awareness and lead generation, result in Sales ignoring 80% of the leads? This is something you can measure and prove for yourself if your company has a CRM. If Sales reps are ignoring many of the leads, then you have a case for automated lead nurturing. If you shift a little budget away from lead generation and stick it in automated lead nurturing, and give the Sales folks better quality leads, the cash register will ring more often.
B2B leads typically
cost $50-$150 each to generate, whilst automated lead nurturing typically costs
less than $1 per lead per year. So it is not going to take much of a decrease
in the lead generation budget to add in some automated lead nurturing. One trade show, or one direct mail campaign
is all it takes.
Perhaps last year you
spent 50K or 100K on a data append and cleanup. Mature Marketing Automation
software has data validation and standardization in the Inbound Marketing
functionality. Perhaps you wouldn’t have to budget so much for data hygiene projects
if only clean data got into the system in the first place.
The Inbound Marketing functionality with dynamic progressive profiling forms and landing pages can also result in higher productivity for your website - ie generate more web leads. So you can consider budgeting for Marketing Automation shifting dollars to more web lead generation.
Happy budgeting.
-Kevin
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