You know that marketing automation is the greatest thing since sliced bread. After all, what else can help you...

1. Get more done faster – with fewer resources
2. Reach the right prospects more effectively
3. Improve conversion rates, revenue, and alignment between marketing and sales.

The trick is to convince the powers that be of the value. To succeed, you need to get inside the heads of your CEO, head of Finance, and head of IT and craft a persuasive argument in the language they understand.

This quick guide will help do just that. You see, we work with thousands of sales and marketing professionals who’ve already gotten executive buy-in and are benefitting from the marketing automation power of Eloqua. Here we share their insights so you know:

• What keeps these executives up at night
• How they view the marketing department
• How marketing automation can address their concerns and win them over

Making Inroads With The Corner Office

Your CEO is constantly thinking about:

1. Top-line growth
2. Customer satisfaction and loyalty
3. The competition
4. Profitability

Wondering what keeps your CEO up at night? Probably these two issues:

How is my company going to make its number?

Are my competitors going to outperform me and steal my customers?

In other words, your CEO cares most about the things that are variable, not readily measured, and oftentimes uncontrollable. (Glad you’re not in that position?!) That means your CEO is all ears when it comes to parts of the business that can be measured and controlled. For example, if revenues are likely to fall short in a given quarter, the CEO can reduce headcount and expenses to ensure profitability. It also means that marketing leaders who make tangible (i.e., financial) contributions will be offered real seats at the executive table.

That’s where marketing automation comes in. Revenue Performance Management (RPM) – enabled by marketing automation – will catch the CEO’s attention. It empowers companies to manage their interactions with buyers through the entire purchase process for more predictable, rapid and profitable revenue growth.

What is Revenue Performance Management?

Revenue Performance Management (RPM) is a strategy for managing a company’s interactions with buyers through the entire purchase process to enable dramatically more predictable, rapid and profitable revenue growth. RPM requires a combination of people, process and technology to:

• Analyze, model and forecast the movement of revenue through an integrated marketing and sales funnel.
• Implement and adhere to a standardized methodology for the adoption of best practices at each revenue stage
• Consistently benchmark performance to optimize results

With RPM, you can manage revenue growth consistently quarter over quarter. And marketing automation helps you do that by:

• Transcending the traditional silos of sales and marketing teams by using agreed-upon, common definitions and revenue goals.
• Optimizing spend on marketing programs and sales headcount.
• Profiling customer information and behavior accurately.
• Guiding prospects through the buying process by delivering the right messages at the right time through the right channel.
• Measuring and managing effectiveness at every stage of the buying cycle.
• Effectively identifying the most effective campaigns and go-tomarket strategies.
• Reliably predictingh the revenue outcomes of marketing and sales efforts

5 Benefits Of Revenue Performance Management - Enabled By Marketing Automation

1. Lower customer acquisition costs
2. Shorter and faster sales cycles
3. Higher average selling prices
4. More predictable sales forecasts
5. Higher ROI from marketing and sales

Make the CEO your Marketing Automation Champion

Here’s how to get through to your CEO. Start by explaining that RPM via automation is how your company can build a marketing engine/factory that consistently produces measurable results.

• Don’t lead with ROI - your CEO likely feels the topic is out of your league
• Do discuss process, systems, and consistency
• Do explain how you’ll measure marketing and sales internally and against similar organizations and industry datat

Whatever you do, don’t overpromise and underdeliver. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your CEO will respect the fact that you want to change sales and marketing processes for the better, not just buy technology.

Acknowledge that it’s really tough to measure and tweak everything that goes into achieving steady, predictable revenue growth. But stress that you can get on the path by starting with a few reports and dashboards, and continually building upon and improving those.

Be sure to emphasize that the competition could also be considering marketing automation and that, in this case, first-mover advantage is pretty critical.

Getting Finance's Sign Off

We know this isn’t news to you, but the person in charge of your company’s finances is all about the numbers. Finance executives are most concerned about:

1. Profitable growth
2. Operating and capital expenses
3. Return on investment
4. Risk management

What keeps your CFO up at night?

How can we grow the business amidst weaker demand and a shortage of skilled talent?

How can we maintain margins while enduring intense price pressure and spiraling healthcare costs?

How can we plan for the future in light of economic uncertainty?

[Download PDF to see Image]

When it comes to marketing’s ability to measure its efforts, the CFO and head of Finance are pretty fed up. It’s no joke to them when you say, “We know half of our marketing budgets are wasted. We just don’t know which half.” In fact, it’s the reason they often pooh-pooh your monthly presentation to the executive team.

Your finance executive is also extremely analytical. This person lives for data. That’s why RPM is just what you need to wedge your foot in the door. With the tools integrated into marketing automation you can measure everything from the time a lead is generated until it translates into revenue. You’ll even be able to understand the interactions between different marketing programs, and quantify the future return on today’s spending.

With automation, marketing can demonstrate its impact on pipeline and revenue to build credibility and add value to the bottom line.

Show Finance the Money

Explain to your finance executive that RPM will empower the organization to confidently measure your contribution to revenues. And that marketing automation will deliver the data to make that happen.

Conversation Starter:

This could be a start to getting your arms around what we do.

Emphasize that in addition to measuring results, RPM and marketing automation will help you more strategically allocate marketing funds.

Conversation Starter:

Instead of basing our plans on intuition, we’ll have the data we need to make informed decisions about this year’s marketing programs.

By tying our campaigns and programs more closely and effectively to the buyer’s journey, we can focus our marketing budget where we’re likely to reap the biggest financial gains.

And make sure to stress that – at its core – marketing automation was designed to enable marketing to do more with the same amount of headcount.

Conversation Starter:

Marketing automation will offload us of manual, repetitive tasks associated with lead generation, scoring, nurturing, and event management. That means we can get more done with the same staff.

Wrap up the discussion by focusing on how you’ll be able to generate reports that give visibility into ROI.

With RPM and marketing automation, we’ll be able to clearly determine whether or not we got what we paid for.

We’ll be able to easily pull in opportunity and revenue data from other systems to gain complete visibility into what’s working and what’s not so we don’t waste time and money on ineffective campaigns.

Real-world Results From Marketing Automation

When it comes to making a significant purchase, your CFO needs a bottoms-up business case that demonstrates a minimum rate of return. Marketing automation is an investment that can do just that…and much more. Here are just a few examples of Eloqua customer success:

• Large insurance company boosted marketing-generated opportunities by 15%
• A major provider of business intelligence realized a 35% increase in the number of won opportunities.
• A major staffing firm experienced a 20% revenue increase from marketing-generated leads

[Download PDF to see Image]

You likely feel you have little in common with the person who runs your company’s IT department. And that’s largely true. While you frequently need assistance from IT to implement campaigns and landing pages, post new content to the website, and send out emails, your CIO or head of IT has lots of other issues on his or her mind, including:

1. Infrastructure optimization
2. Business intelligence
3. Global operations
4. Virtualization and cloud computing
5. Business agility
6. Process automation
7. Support for mobile workers and devices
8. Data and system security

In fact, this person is often up at night worrying about the following:

How can the company accomplish its goals when we’re constrained by insufficient funding, lack of time and technical resources, and poor support from management?

How can IT meet the business’ needs in a streamlined fashion?

How can we deliver the insights needed to make informed business decisions?

How can we convince the business of the strategic value of IT?

No wonder the head of IT cringes when you approach. He or she is used to you painting a rosy, 30,000-foot view of your creative programs and goals and thinks you haven’t a clue as to what it takes to make your vision a reality. Compounding matters, your CIO is frustrated because you bring IT in at the last minute when you want to purchase a new solution. It’s no surprise that marketing and IT often play the blame game.

Impress It With Your Practical Side

So here’s the approach you need to take to win over IT. First, explain how an investment in marketing automation is a win for both marketing and IT.

The Solution

• Ties together disparate reporting mechanisms
• Can greatly improve data integrity via built-in analytics tools and data normalization
• Provides more IT power and functionality without a large investment in time and resources

Tips for Getting IT On Board with a Marketing Automation Solution

• Present in a concrete, logical manner
• Introduce IT to the automation vendor early on
• Meet with your IT group to find out how to ensure a smooth implementation

Questions From IT

Generalities don’t register with the head of IT so be prepared to answer the following questions in a detailed, structured way.

How does this solution work; for example, is it hosted on premise or is it a SaaS offering? And what’s required of IT to get it working in our environment?

How and where is our data stored, transmitted and protected? And what measures exist so that our existing operations and security aren’t compromised by plugging into the solution?

What are the regular, ongoing operational aspects of the solution? And how do these affect my team and other systems within my organization?

What type of ongoing support does the vendor deliver?

If we aren’t happy with the solution, what does it take to extract ourselves from it both operationally and contractually?

Keep in mind that your CIO will be considering all the interdependencies associated with each of these questions. As you’re starting your research into marketing automation solutions, ask if you can meet with the head of IT to get a comprehensive list of questions. Then schedule a follow-up meeting where you can share the answers.