Every time I talk to our tech team, I’m amazed by the simple questions that they ask. This time it was, “what do you want the marketing automation program to do?” By this point in the process we all know the answer to that, right?! Obviously, we want it to automate our marketing. You know… automatically. And do all that other marketing-ey stuff.
Ok, so maybe it’s time to think about this a bit more. Tech needs to know specifics about the types of emails we want to send, what landing pages we would host on the MA, which fields we need to integrate with our CRM, what we hope to do with the information the MA tool gathers, and a long list of other questions that we really should ponder before making a decision.
Katie and I called a meeting to hash it all out, but with so many people involved in the purchase (Sales, Marketing, Tech, our CEO), our meeting was going on too many tangents, so we decided to start a shared spreadsheet instead. Each team could list what they wanted the software to do, and tech could ask questions to determine which of the four remaining systems would work best with our existing business processes and tech infrastructure.
We gave ourselves a week to finish this step in the buying process. Read the rest of this entry »
