Marketing: Strategy to Solution Blue Print

Marketing Automation Solutions vs. Direct Marketing Solutions

What is the key difference between a Marketing Automation solution and a Direct Marketing Solution. I was having lunch with a colleague of mine and we were discussing why Market2Lead's (the company I work for) solution is different from other direct Marketing solutions. The one difference that stood out from our conversation is Marketing Automation solutions are Contact/Prospect centric whereas Direct Marketing solutions are Campaign centric.

If we take an Email Marketing solution for example, launching a campaign typically begins with importing a list. The next Campaign needs another List. It is very possible that the system can have more than one record for the same Prospect in the database. The Prospect's responses to different Campaigns are spread across these records defeating the purpose of "Nurturing the Lead" over time.

Marketing Automation solutions, on the other hand, support a Contact database that can be used to consolidate all Prospect interactions into one record. This includes ability to merge and consolidate Activities and Responses from both online and offline campaigns.

"Sales Ready Leads": Where does this definition live?

I was watching Brian Carroll's webinar, "A Multimodal Approach to Lead Nurturing for Comples Sales". One of the key points that Brian made on the webinar is the need for Sales and Marketing to agree on the definition of a "Sales ready lead". This got me thinking, "Where does this definition live? Most Marketing organizations I have worked with use a mix of technologies to manage their Marketing campaigns and end up bringing Leads from these different systems directly into their SFA system. For example, web inquiries, attendees from online and offline events are directly brought into SFA systems like salesforce.com.

The key is to have a Lead Management solution that sits between Marketing and Sales systems and holds the definition of the "Sales ready leads".