As a buyer of sales an
d marketing automation, I cannot help but getting seriously wound up about the over-hyped solutions on offer today. One solution doesn’t integrate with mainstream CRM systems, the other requires an entirely separate data warehouse environment to actually take it through the required workflows and yet another charges an arm and a leg for the e-mail portion of the lead nurturing process. It seems that practically every vendor matches my needs by 50-80%. Which leaves me with 20-50% manual tweaking or bridging the void with yet another ‘gap filler’ solution or app. That’s hardly ‘automation’…
So, can automation really be achieved? Are sales and marketing needs too varied by industry and/or product for vendors to provide a 90-100% match every time? Tell you what, that’s who I’m grilling next: senior execs of marketing automation vendors here I come.
