6 Steps to Selecting a B2B Marketing Automation Platform

The right vendor depends on your own personal requirements

Marketing Automation vendors are not one-size-fits-all. It is important that you choose the right vendor for your specific business requirements as B2B companies have more complex and longer buyer journeys and more people involved in the buying process. Your Marketing Automation platform selection should focus on finding the best fit with your business plans, resources and company culture. There are several ways to navigate the selection process, including a formal RFP (Request for Proposal) for shortlisting vendors to running in depth demonstrations. Here are six steps that will help you in this process.

1. Define Your Business Goals

In order to know what a Marketing Automation vendor should be able to deliver in terms of features and service, it is important to clearly define the business challenges or opportunities that you are facing. Describe the gap between the current situation and the desired state. This will be a great starting point for a list of requirements that summarise your needs, but also allows you to get internal feedback and build support from within your company.

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2. Avoid Shiny Object Syndrome

Looking at all the features of potential Marketing Automation platforms, it can be easy to get distracted and go for the vendor with that one beautiful feature. To avoid Shiny Object Syndrome, summarise your wants and needs to determine what they will be assessed on.

Try to split it into categories:

• Essential (deal-breakers)
• Key Features (things that the solution should do)
• Desirables (nice to have but could do without)

3. Restrict Your Choices

After learning about the possibilities and making your first list of requirements, try to restrict your choices of vendors quickly. There are 161 Marketing Automation & Campaign/Lead Management vendors as part of the total 3,874 marketing technology solutions in Scott Brinker’s infamous Marketing Technology Landscape super-graphic. Each and every extra vendor you research will take extra time to analyse, consider, meet and makes the selection more challenging. You can’t easily assess all the features from hundreds of vendors. You have to move to a shortlist. Ideally, you would focus on 4 to 6 vendors in your Request for Proposal or RFP. To review criteria you should consider, check out our Free Marketing Automation and Email marketing RFP criteria.

4. Professionally Manage Your Own Team and The Vendor

The vendors might be used to pitching in every type of situation, but a professional attitude can greatly improve the whole selection process. Include a realistic timeframe in your RFP, where you outline the steps in the process and how you expect the interactions to take place. Do your own homework and ask them to present the requirements that you are most interested in. Use the same requirements across all vendors so you can make a fair comparison.

5. Challenge Vendors With a Scenario

After you receive the RFPs back, and you’ve spoken to the vendors to get an introduction, it’s time to shortlist 2-3 vendors for an in-depth demonstration. You really want to get insight into the features and benefits of the product and how they match your requirements. Create a scenario, or test case, and ask them how they would handle it. You can even ask them to run an example campaign. This moves decision-making beyond a checklist and gives you a real tangible visualisation.

6. Services Are As Important As The Product

The implementation, set-up and training are as important as the features and should be a key area of the selection process. Speak to similar companies that used the vendors product and services, with similar challenges, in the same industry as you. Ask the vendor to provide a high level implementation plan and make sure you have the internal resources (people, time and budget) to smoothly move forward into implementation.

As B2B customers have longer and more complex buying processes with more people involved in the decision-making, it is essential that you have a clear strategy and plan in place. To choose the correct Marketing Automation platform you must first map out your business specific buyer journey, lead definitions, scoring and the service level agreements between marketing and sales.

Adrian O’Gara is a specialist in lead and funnel management — from sales and marketing alignment to process optimisation and automation. As founder and lead consultant at OGaraCo, the lead-to-revenue experts, Adrian helps B2B technology and service providers improve lead quality and velocity to increase marketing sourced revenue and ROI. Find out more at ogaraco.com or connect with Adrian LinkedIn