Despite the significant growth and popularity of Mastering Marketing Automation: Your Strategic Imperative“> marketing automation, many businesses still struggle with full implementation. This comprehensive SMB Marketing Automation Checklist distills the key ingredients for Small to Medium Businesses, serving as a powerful resource to design your own Request for Proposal (RFP) and avoid the common pitfalls of selecting the wrong platform.
Why Marketing Automation Matters for SMBs
Sales and marketing automation combines best practices and software to enhance product and service marketing, boost sales opportunities, shorten administration times, and significantly increase overall productivity. Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) often have operational structures primed for organization and optimization, making them ideal candidates for these solutions.
A survey by Regalix highlighted the following as key benefits of marketing automation for businesses:
* Improved lead management (86% of marketers)
* Measurable results (73%)
* Enhanced targeting & personalization (66%)
* Seamless campaign execution & tracking (64%)
* Increased productivity (62%)
* Marketing and sales alignment (50%)
It’s clear why more SMBs are adopting marketing automation. MarketsandMarkets estimates that revenue from marketing automation platforms reached $5.50 billion in 2019, a substantial 65% increase from $3.65 billion in 2014. By leveraging this checklist as a benchmark, SMBs can significantly improve their chances of growing to the next level.
Maximizing Value from Your SMB Marketing Automation Checklist
This article serves as a crucial resource to guide your selection process, potentially saving you time, expense, and frustration. As you navigate through the checklist, carefully evaluate each element’s importance and relevance to your specific business needs. Try to visualize how each request would function once implemented.
Remember, you don’t need to implement every item simultaneously when adopting a new platform; you can scale your efforts over time. While the list is extensive, don’t be discouraged, as some items may not apply to your unique situation.
Section 1: Pre-Relationship – Vendor Assistance & Guidance
Affordable Entry & Flexible Obligations
For SMBs new to marketing automation, cost and the magnitude of contractual obligations are common deterrents. Several solutions offer pay-as-you-go pricing combined with an adequate level of marketing automation. Vendors such as ActiveCampaign, Ontraport, and Infusionsoft often fit this description.
Most Desired Monthly Cost Range: $150.00 – $1,200.00
Most Preferred Contractual Terms: Pay-As-You-Go or Month-to-Month
A vendor’s openness, helpfulness, and preparedness in onboarding new clients are strong indicators of future service quality. The following checklist items signal a smooth transition to your new marketing automation platform.
Test Drive the Software for Fit
You should demand at least 30 days on a system to ensure comfort with the overall experience. This includes assessing the user experience, the effort required to set up basic automation routines, and the attentiveness of their support staff. For instance, automated meeting requests need a week or two to yield results, and you’ll want to confirm that setting up alerts was straightforward and that the marketing automation vendor’s support team readily provided real-time assistance via web meetings.
Extended access and a prolonged testing period are essential for companies transitioning from tools like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and other CRM solutions to a comprehensive marketing automation platform.
The testing period becomes even more critical if you’re using Salesforce or similar CRM platforms due to additional intricacies to evaluate. This includes automating based on Opportunity status or specific attribute fields, and the ability for front-line sales staff to view prospect activity and manually control automation streams directly within the CRM’s interface.
Free Setup, Guidance, and Onboarding
The vendor should provide free help and assistance to get you started. If you’re unsure where to begin with automation setup, the vendor ought to offer discovery sessions to help define productive marketing and sales routines. The primary goal is to get started, so begin with simple campaigns and processes, avoiding the urge to do everything at once.
Comprehensive Training & Resources for Users
A well-organized and extensive library of training materials is non-negotiable. The quality of these resources is a quick indicator of the vendor’s overall quality, reflecting the knowledge of the individuals who will support you.
Training resources can include:
* How-to videos
* Web seminars
* A comprehensive knowledge base
* Campaign templates
* Mind maps
Some vendors even provide custom videos tailored to specific use cases.
Expertise in Platform Transitions
Familiarity and experience with migrating customers from their previous tools to the new platform are critical. This expertise can smooth the transition and prevent common setup pitfalls. Significant time can be lost trying to understand different terminology and draw feature analogies during deployment.
You want a vendor that is familiar with platforms you might be leaving, such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, Marketo, and HubSpot, as they can streamline your transition and setup phases.
The most challenging aspect of transitions often involves existing automation workflows. If you have these, they must be part of your SMB Marketing Automation Checklist. Your new vendor should assist you in preventing duplicate messages and picking up where drip campaigns left off. Transitioning lead scoring mechanisms can also require experienced assistance.
Experience with Similar Business Processes
A seasoned support staff that has worked with SMB accounts similar to yours is a significant asset. You’ll benefit immensely from their insights into valuable tricks, best practices, and lessons learned from past efforts.
Here’s an added tip: during the evaluation stage, test the support representative by asking for advice or critiques on what you intend to automate. You want a critical thinker who won’t simply “take your order” but will actively help you avoid investing time and money down the wrong path.
Accessible & Responsive Vendor Support
Transitions into unfamiliar territory can be uncomfortable and even intimidating. Initially, you might need extensive hand-holding, and you will likely spend many hours with your vendor as you fine-tune sales and marketing automation routines.
Therefore, you require three critical qualities from the vendor:
* A dedicated representative who understands your company, its challenges, and objectives.
* A person with a warm, professional, and thoughtful demeanor.
* A representative who prioritizes your needs above their personal economic incentives.
A robust vendor treats you as an investment. You want to feel that they understand you could be a long-term client and that they value your calls, even when you move on to your next marketing role.
Section 2: Templates to Jumpstart Usage
Ready-to-Use Email & Mobile Templates
These templates are essential, especially if you lack an in-house designer or manage multiple message streams simultaneously.
Intuitive Landing Page Templates & Forms Wizard
Landing pages should be easy to create and include standard calls-to-action. Support for mobile and multi-device compatibility is also crucial.
Clear Marketing & Business Process Maps
These are diagrams that visually illustrate common business processes and guide you on how to use and set up the system effectively.
Be wary of overly complicated line diagrams that are difficult to follow and even harder to implement. When getting started, limit your focus to no more than three related events.
An example of three related events to automate:
1. Contact purchases product.
2. Trigger coupon email in three months.
3. Trigger alert for customer care to call in three months.
Section 3: “Business in a Box” – Integrated Operations Support
Integrated operations support is incredibly important as it directly leads to increased productivity and reduced costs across your organization.
Saving just one hour per employee per month can translate into tens of millions in extra revenue and reduced labor expenses.
Furthermore, for sales teams, this statistic is invaluable: LeadResponseManagement.org reports that the odds of contacting a lead if called within 5 minutes are 100 times greater than if called in 30 minutes.
Beyond individual efficiency, when different roles coordinate on a single sales and marketing automation platform, the system can provide insights into how efficiently business is flowing across marketing, sales, and support functions.
How does a sales and marketing automation platform achieve this? By providing customizable analytic charts based on three key components: data synchs, target population counts, and automated action counts. All three represent the pulse of your business flow.
For instance, you can track the number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) entering an information drip and the volume of “3 Month Check-In” messages sent to long-standing customers.
Secure Cloud Connections for Remote Data Researchers
Many businesses utilize outsourced data researchers to build contact databases, often leveraging platforms like LinkedIn and Xing. These researchers typically call contacts for opt-ins, make initial offers, and append attributes to data.
These resources frequently operate from remote call centers, necessitating a platform that offers the benefits of integration without compromising data security. Your sales and marketing automation tool should seamlessly sweep your research teams’ contact databases to rapidly add new contacts to demand generation streams.
Related to this, there’s growing interest in synchronization with Google Docs spreadsheets. SMBs, particularly Salesforce users, appreciate this simple and cost-effective method for flowing contact data into marketing streams. Demand generation, targeting, nurturing, and alerts to front-line sales all benefit from a tight connection to remote researchers’ data updates.
Empowering Your Marketing Team
The marketing team requires the ability to access, de-duplicate, intelligently combine, and append contact data from various sources. A typical B2B marketer works with data from Google Drive, a CRM tool, LinkedIn, and Facebook for their campaigns. They need a single portal to manage data, execute campaigns, and compare results across multiple initiatives.
The ideal SMB marketing automation tool will possess the following attributes:
- Ability to compile, aggregate, and intelligently append data from different sources like their CRM tool, sales rep’s Google Contacts, and data researchers.
- Mass email blast capability combined with high deliverability to generate prospects for frontline sales and facilitate follow-up nurturing.
- Robust nurture drips and triggered campaigns.
- Automation tools to set up lead scoring, sales alerts, and meeting requests.
- Comprehensive campaign performance data across multiple channels.
Front-Line Sales Access to MQLs & Pipeline Management
An effective front-line sales team in an SMB requires at least three key features: access to contacts across multiple sales territories, real-time activity information, and tools to organize call lists. Given that a telesales representative might support an entire region or country, their time efficiency is paramount.
The following are must-have features for running an efficient front-line sales department:
- Real-time call alerts for when prospects visit your website or click emails.
- Real-time contact activity dashboards to stay informed about new prospects and companies visiting your website, submitting forms, opening emails, and clicking emails.
- Real-time contact journey maps to enable intelligent conversations about prospect needs.
- Automated and manual tagging to organize call lists and bookmark individual contacts for the next follow-up or to advance them to the next step of the sales pipeline.
- Ability to manually add contacts into relevant nurture drips. Your front line is rich with information about prospects’ needs, so empower them to manually override and manage the flow of automated information.
- Ability to easily customize 1:1 emails by dragging and dropping pre-approved collateral blocks into HTML emails.
If your team earns bonuses for demos and trials, they will appreciate automated campaigns that reinforce and remind prospects of sales conversations.
SQL Highlights, Messaging & Address Book Syncs for Sales Reps
“Road warriors” prefer to be on the phone closing deals and writing proposals, often avoiding their CRM tools entirely. They also need a creative way to share their proposals with all prospect stakeholders.
Here are the platform features that keep Sales Representatives productive:
- An email or mobile feed of sales-ready leads.
- Automatic meta-tagging of each lead’s profile based on digital activity and attributes. Tagging provides the key talking points that outside reps need to prepare. A critical point often overlooked by many companies is that fleshing out Contact Journeys and digital activities is time-consuming, and the granularity of that information is better applied by Front-Line Sales.
- Ability to easily customize 1:1 emails by dragging and dropping pre-approved collateral blocks into HTML emails.
- Ability to easily and securely socialize and share custom web pages containing all key talking points. A user-friendly HTML editor with connected access to drag-and-drop collateral blocks is essential to achieve this socialization objective.
- Ability to import contact data from Google Contacts.
Support for Customer Service Teams
Support teams are invaluable ambassadors for your organization, making it crucial for them to have immediate familiarity with prospect and customer goals. Sales and marketing automation tools provide insights that support staff need for a quick read on prospect and customer sentiment. Additionally, having a fast, shorthand way to share their assessment of sentiment is a huge benefit for sales and executive teams.
Here are platform features that help support staff focus on what matters most and facilitate bottom-up sentiment reporting:
- Full contact journey and tags used as shortcuts to quickly understand inquirer interests.
- A sentiment meter, such as a “thumbs up” toggle (0 – 5), to document how well your company is performing with the inquirer.
- A “flame meter” toggle used to prioritize call-backs and cases.
- Comments and notes are important for record-keeping and sharing case knowledge.
Actionable Analytics for Executives & Analysts
Data analysts, business analysts, marketers, and executives all seek ROI calculations to optimize spending. These roles also desire analytics that provide simple Key Performance Indicator (KPI) charts and immediate visibility into performance data.
There’s also a growing demand for predictive engines that use customer data and response data to identify target market sweet spots and automatically optimize campaigns.
These commonly requested features go beyond simple campaign reporting:
- Custom executive dashboards.
- Custom data objects used to track specific KPIs.
- A drag-and-drop charting tool to mash up business performance data. For example – view a timeline of cold call volume, mass emails sent, number of new trial users, and new customers.
- Recommendation engines for target market segments and marketing message optimization.
- Standard time-period comparison charts of basic pipeline and business health metrics. For example – track the growth of MQLs, SQLs, Sales Call Attempts, Sales Call Connections, Demos Conducted, New Customers, Customer Ratings, and New Customers hitting a 1-Year Anniversary.
This SMB Marketing Automation Checklist is most valuable if you’re actively considering implementing marketing automation. Hopefully, it prompted you to reflect on your expectations and how these top requested items align with your vision.
SMBs are generally categorized as organizations with 10–200 employees and revenues between $1M–$50M. This checklist will have the greatest impact on companies within this profile, as they are best positioned to extract the highest value from sales and marketing automation.
This article is part of a series exploring popular requests in SMB marketing automation. Future discussions will delve into specific portal and marketing features.