Oracles Acquisition of Eloqua Solidifies the Importance of Marketing Automation
At the end of 2012, the software giant that is Oracle made waves in the sales and marketing landscape when it purchased Eloqua, a marketing automation and demand generation solutions provider.
We applaud the acquisition made with the intention of integrating Oracle’s sales automation solution (Siebel) and Eloqua’s marketing automation as movement in the right direction toward uniting sales and marketing. However, besides the growing pains involved in technology acquisitions, there is still a lot of ground to cover before a holistic sales and marketing solution can exist.
Lead Generation + CRM = A Good Start
Consumers live in a constant state of information overload. Successful brand communication requires relevant, timely messaging through the consumers preferred channel. This is a major need that the Eloqua acquisition doesn’t address. Sales can have all the CRM monitored leads in the world, but if they aren’t provided with the tools to convert them, the customer experience can be inconsistent, redundant or just plain wrong – ultimately having little effect on ROI.
When Eloqua is integrated with a CRM it automates lead nurturing in digital marketing campaigns. If properly used, Eloqua can raise awareness and interest to generate marketing qualified leads, but what happens once they are handed off to the sales team? All to often, these well nurtured leads are handed off to improperly prepared or poorly equipped rogues. How does this happen?
Marketing Control & Sales Autonomy
As marketers sit firmly planted at headquarters, armed with research and spreadsheets they work to craft their brand. They spend most of their time researching, testing and surveying to create a magical strategy that can be supported by compelling, on brand content. Yet they know the strategy must be executed with accuracy and precision to be successful. In their eyes, brand alignment is essential to customer acquisition, and straying from that alignment is inefficient and the inconsistency is detrimental.
Salespeople are out in the world, they are your company’s brand representation in human form, and they hear first hand the needs of consumers. They want more than anybody to be relevant and timely with their messages. When confronted with a hot lead, they have the option to talk around generic marketing material, or submit a request to marketing to get a customized piece. In most cases, they bypass marketing and sacrifice brand consistency to customize and personalize hacked marketing materials.
The Gap Between Sales & Marketing is Proven
A study conducted by the American Marketing Association (AMA) shows salespeople don’t use 90% of marketing materials provided and spend 30 hours a month looking for the right promotional content. What’s worse is that ‘rule hawk’ sales people who don’t hack their own content are constantly bogging down marketing with customization requests.
A similar study done by Gartner highlighted the effects of inconsistent branding. It showed that executives are 85% aligned with the brand, marketing 65% and sales 35%. This disparity in brand consistency leaves only 10% of customers aligned with your brand’s intended message.
In our information overloaded market, brand alignment is essential to customer acquisition. Moreover, when professionals are expected to do more with less, any inefficiency or inconsistency is detrimental to the company.
The Fision Solution
We’ve been helping companies deal with content specific efficiency and consistency issues for years; it’s the foundation of why we created Fision.
The proliferation of technology in sales and marketing and the mantra that “content is king” are core concepts that drive the direction of our company. As the juxtaposition of globalization and localization dominates strategy, the marriage of those two concepts becomes incredibly important.
Fision is a marketing asset management system that empowers sales (and distributed networks) to access, customize and distribute materials with marketing approved imagery and messaging across any channel including web, mobile and social. Having all of these capabilities in one platform provides marketing with comprehensive customer data, visibility over usage and effectiveness, and control over messaging. Simultaneously, it gives sales professionals the autonomy they need to speak directly to their prospects in a timely manner while maintaining brand consistency.
Our continued integration with the CRM and campaign management platforms accomplishes our vision to complete the automation of the sales funnel; and to unify the goals of sales and marketing professionals – making their working lives easier and more successful.
Marketing department resource allocation for our client before and after implementing Fision