Magic and genius at the service of customer experience Camp N°2 / Marketing Automation B2B Digital Marketing Maturity You are now in camp number two. You have previously set up a robust organisation in terms of operational marketing and content production. You have launched your content strategy which will take some time to produce results. You have transformed your website and chosen your marketing automation solution. Aligning the marketing and sales departments During this marketing automation project, you will take advantage of it to start aligning the sales and marketing teams. What does this mean? It is primarily a human process rather than a technical one. It's about bringing the sales and marketing teams together, putting them in the same room, so they can start to establish together a common vocabulary: what is a lead? What is a hot lead? What is an opportunity? How are the transitions between these different steps? Once the marketing team's got hot leads to pass on to the sales team who qualifies, assigns and clears those leads and, likewise, how can the sales team send information to the marketing team to possibly reject leads? You will take the opportunity to establish a scoring model together, in common, and put, in the marketing automation solution and the CRM, part of the sales cycle that you have defined. The goal, eventually, is for the sales and marketing teams to start talking, meet every month, every week, in order co-construct the marketing campaigns of tomorrow. Connecting CRM and marketing automation The last step in camp number one is to connect the sales tool, the CRM, with your marketing automation solution, so that you can directly send the marketing automation's information, hot leads and their score directly into the sales tool and be able to retrieve the information gleaned by the sales team and use them in campaigns. This will probably require developments in the CRM tool, which is often oriented towards customer management at the beginning rather than prospect management. These changes will probably happen a bit later in time. At this stage of the project, you should have one or two achievers on your marketing automation solution, more occasional marketing users, but trained on the solution, a team, what we call (inaudible) content production, either in-house or outsourced. These people also have to deal with strategy, data quality and responding to all the leads that you're going to generate. Automating existing campaigns The big work site in camp number one is to make your marketing automation project a success. What does this mean? It means empowering your teams on the solution you have chosen. How do you do that? We generally implement good practices in marketing automation, naming, foldering, scoring, channels. You will mainly automate existing campaigns, the campaigns you were doing before, in your marketing automation solution. This will allow your teams to try their hand and gain confidence in the solution. You're going to do email blasts, AB testing, webinars, content downloads, relatively simple campaigns, but which will allow you to move on to the next step. Optimising email deliverability Firstly, you will continue for quite some time to do outbound campaigns, mass emailing campaigns, so it's pretty timely, right from the start, to look at the deliverability of emails, which will have a pretty big impact at this stage. E-mail deliverability, technically, it's about complying with all deliverability standards; SPF, DKIM and others, but mostly business. How to write an e-mail properly? Who should send the e-mail? What do you put in the subject line? The place of images, how to enable your prospects and customers to unsubscribe, or even indicate their preferences? When to send an e-mail? All these good practices in emailing are quite interesting to learn from the start, so that your e-mails have the biggest impact. Next building site: