Since marketing automation has gained momentum a full decade after the ERP era, marketers have the benefit of learning from the mistakes of early adopters.  User adoption is something to focus on before, during, and after the technology phase of the project.  Here are some of the best practices that successful companies use to conquer this pesky challenge:

1. Make it a priority and define an owner.  In the same way that an IT project manager is responsible for the success of technical integration, an individual should be clearly responsible for transitioning the organization.  Start here and your chance of success doubles.
2. Start early with the user community.  Users should be involved from the very beginning of the process.  Choosing representatives from your end users and including them in the planning process will avoid push back and resentment later.  They will also help you avoid gaps that will become big problems later on.
3. Define the future state process.  All of our clients agree on one thing—the future state process should be defined, reviewed, and approved before any technology is implemented.  User representatives will provide feedback and you can avoid the inevitable calamity that will result from technology that fails to align with the planned processes.
4. Define and execute a communications plan.  Users should understand your vision and enthusiasm for the new solution.  The executive sponsors should be in agreement on the goals and objectives of the new automation system.  We recommend that you communicate to your user community at least twice a month during the full length of system development.
5. Obsess over your business requirements.  Capturing the requirements of your business and users will result in a system that hits the mark when it is released.  Gaps should be identified and work arounds provided ahead of time.  Users will check out when they sense that you have failed to capture the detailed requirements of their jobs.
6. Celebrate early success.  As users begin their involvement, frustrations will happen.  Make sure that you identify early success and celebrate.  Partnering with your HR department can be helpful.
7. Provide time to do the work.  Very often the individuals selected to participate in the change process are well respected leaders within their teams.  This implies that they are the busiest and most important individuals to get daily work done.  Managers must explicitly take work away from key participants so they may focus on the process transition.
8. Focus on user acceptance testing (UAT).  Too often UAT focuses only on very specific technical functionality.  UAT should be a critical part of creating user adoption.  The requirements should reflect the future state process that will be implemented.
9. Time user enablement for success.  We have seen clients provide training months in advance of UAT.  Training has a shelf life of about four weeks if not put to immediate use.  Make sure that you provide adequate training and that it gets delivered at the right time.
10. Lean on your executive sponsors.  Users will look to your leadership to evaluate their commitment to the new technology and process.  Executives need to understand the importance of their attitudes toward success.  Users will quickly sense any cracks in their commitment.

In most cases, careful planning and use of best practices such as these will ensure the engagement of your user community.  In those cases where the future state process is a radical departure from the past, a more formal change management process might be required.  In those cases, the use of a specialty organization may be helpful.

In our work with dozens of organizations, executive engagement is a key predictor of transformation success. All too often, executives are involved in making the decision to make an investment, then become passive observers of the implementation process. When the marketing automation project hits the inevitable speed bumps that happen in every case, executives are caught by surprise and are not able to make the quick and decisive actions that are required to get the project back on a successful track. Based on our work with dozens of large organizations, here are several of the best practices that we advise our clients to follow:

1. Focus on the business owners. While IT and program management should be represented, the primary participants should be the business owners that will benefit from the project outcomes. We recommend a steering committee of 3 or 4 business owners and the IT owner of the marketing automation project.
2. Define a clear charter and governance model. Executive ownership and responsibility should be clearly defined in writing and understood by the participants. Many companies allow for informal and ad hoc oversight. This works well until the first project crises catches everyone off guard.
3. Understand the risks and risk mitigation strategies. Everyone on the executive oversight committee should be aware of project risks and prepare for preventative actions. We are often asked to document an objective assessment of project risks prior to the start of a major marketing automation initiative.
4. Provide frank and open communications on a scheduled basis. Many times delivery teams provide an overly optimistic view of what is happening in delivery. We frequently serve as an independent “auditor” of the project and provide an objective view of the current state of development.
5. Prepare for strong actions. Executives make big decisions to go ahead with any type of marketing automation. They should be prepared to back up that initial decision with follow up actions if the project gets derailed. Many project failures can be prevented by strong action when the first sign of trouble happens.
6. Focus on the big picture. Vendors and IT organizations tend to focus on the technology and infrastructure aspects of the project. Executives should ensure that the overall initiative includes oversight of the communication plan, training and enablement, as well as the broader topic of change management. Projects are ultimately successful when employees are acting in a new way and customers are noticing the difference in how marketing is executed.

Finally, executive oversight should focus on the big opportunity as well. While the primary focus may be on managing risk and ensuring success, every business owner should have a clear view to any emerging opportunity that arises from the project. We encourage all of our clients to stay positive and be looking for ways to increase the return on their investment.

But this dialogue paradigm is giving way to something much more strategic and more in line with the vision of the 1 to 1 customer relationship that was envisioned at the dawn of the CRM era. Leading CRM practitioners are now looking at designing customer experiences that cross marketing, sales, customer service, and e-commerce. Thanks to advances in technology—marketing automation, sales force automation, real-time decisioning, and web analytics to name a few products in the mix, delivering an integrated customer experience is now a real possibility.

This capability is also facilitated by the increasing sophistication of integration between these products. Five years ago, a technology standard known as service-oriented architecture (SOA) allowed applications from any vendor to work together in a real-time basis. Today, most CRM technology supports this type of capability. But even more importantly is the advent of the AppExchange from SalesForce which provides a means to easily share information about customers, leads, campaigns and other customer-centric data across any software that supports the standard. There are literally thousands of applications that have been certified to work under this umbrella.

So what are the biggest barriers to making this happen if the technology is readily available? In working with major corporations who are grappling with this challenge, we see challenges that can be much more challenging than implementing the proper technology.

First, this expanded view of the customer experience crosses significant organizational power boundaries. When defining a broad customer experience, CRM visionaries must work with a variety of channel owners who have their own agenda and incentives to maximize their own success.

Ironically, many organizations have constructed a silo around their e-commerce activities. While the company website is a powerful marketing tool, it is also a major source of direct revenue. Owners of the e-commerce channel may have little interest in partnering with their counterparts in marketing if it leads to reduced revenue recognition for their online business. Similarly, sales management is always interested in closing a deal in the shortest possible time. While marketers are focused on customer engagement and relationship building, they have to work through a sales function with a more immediate focus.

The second big challenge to the creation of an integrated customer experience is the increasing importance of inbound customer activities in the marketing mix. As customer response to traditional marketing continues to erode, the importance of customer initiated marketing continues to increase.

Rather than designing a multi-step dialogue, marketers must work to define “the next best action” given a wide variety of customer behaviors. Doing this well requires a mastery of predictive analytics, business rules, as well as traditional campaign design. This is a major challenge, but one that has been shown to increase marketing effectiveness by an order of magnitude.

In upcoming blog posts, we will talk about ways to meet the challenges of the new era of CRM.

While these tools have obvious synergy, they have been slow to come together. The primary barrier to this “great coming together” has been the fundamental difference in viewpoint between the two products. Marketing automation is all about a customer that exists over a period of time and needs to be treated as an individual. Web analytics, on the other hand, focuses on individual sessions and has primarily been used by owners of websites to see what pages are viewed in what order and for how long.

Fortunately, both sides have moved closer to each other in the past few years. Web analytics publishers have added a much deeper notion of a “persistent customer” that can be studied both within and between web sessions. Users of marketing automation have now started to think in a more real-time fashion, allowing them to take advantage of the type of data that web analytics provides.

All of the major marketing automation vendors are starting to deliver products or integrations to make this convenient for marketers to leverage. On the B2B side, Eloqua has created a set of functionality built around the “Digital Body Language” allowing marketers and their partners in sales to be notified when a prospect or customer browses their website. In the same way that a physical store clerk can greet a visitor, users of marketing automation and web analytics can now greet their electronic visitors in the same fashion. One of the other leading providers of B2B marketing automation software, Aprimo, has partnered with the category leader, Omniture, to deliver similar capabilities.

On the B2C side, Unica has already jumped head first into the fray in 2006 with their acquisition of Sane Solutions. Over the past three plus years, Unica has built their next generation of marketing automation platform on core web analytics capabilities they acquired in this transaction.

Anyone who is looking to make an investment in marketing automation in 2010 and beyond should look carefully at how their selected vendor can deliver functionality combining these two powerful capabilities. If you market to other businesses, you will want to monitor your prospects and react to their web visits and notify your sales channel when someone walks in to your electronic store. If you sell to consumers, you will want to look at things like cart abandonments and how you can market to someone based on their behavior when engaged with your brand.

The good news is that all of this will become cheaper and more automated to implement as these capabilities become commonplace.

Weesner, who earned her marketing degree from SDSU in 1993, is the founder and CEO of Marketing Transformation Services, which offers consulting expertise to organizations looking to deploy successful strategies for streamlining and automating their marketing operations.

“Beth’s experience as a CEO, marketing professional and SDSU graduate provides her with both the business expertise and understanding of the College that made her a natural choice to serve on the board,” said Dr. Gail K. Naughton, dean of SDSU’s College of Business Administration. “Her fresh ideas and innovative communications approach will be a tremendous asset in raising the awareness of the objectives of the College of Business Administration and inspiring our students.”

“As an alumna of SDSU’s business program, I believe that the students within the College have all the resources at their disposal to achieve at the highest levels,” said Weesner. “The opportunities that were available to me as an undergraduate in the early 1990’s opened doors that enabled me to become a successful entrepreneur/CEO of my own company. I am honored to be seated on the board of directors for the SDSU College of Business Administration.”

Weesner also serves on the board of advisors for Women in Consulting, as well as several international philanthropic organizations.

About the College of Business Administration

With over 5,000 students, SDSU’s College of Business Administration is one of the largest business schools in the U.S. Its programs have been ranked among the top programs in the country by U.S. News & World Report and the Princeton Review. For more information, visit www.sdsu.edu/business.

About SDSU

San Diego State University is the oldest and largest higher education institution in the San Diego region. Since it was founded in 1897, the university has grown to offer bachelor’s degrees in 85 areas, master’s degrees in 75 areas and doctorates in 16 areas. SDSU’s more than 34,000 students participate in academic curriculum distinguished by direct contact with faculty and an increasing international emphasis that prepares them for a global future. For more information, visit www.sdsu.edu.

Last week, MTS held its 7th Executive Roundtable Session. As both a host and an attendee, I was incredibly pleased with the turnout and the conversation. So many times you hear about these events and question how much new information you are really going to garner out of it. Executives by definition are a pretty experienced lot, so trying to stimulate conversation around something new is pretty challenging. But if I do say so myself, I believe this event did generate some positive discussion and provoke perhaps one or two new ideas.

Joe Stanhope, Senior Analyst with Forrester Research kicked off with his presentation on Transforming Web Intelligence to Inform a Multichannel Strategy. When you think about today’s customer experience, everything points back to the web. Whether someone is making a personal purchase or a corporate one, most of the touch points that a customer is going to leverage through the purchasing process connect to the web. This is both a source of customer satisfaction, because customers can access what they need when and where they need it, as well as a source of frustration, because companies are still learning how to tie the experience of one channel to the next. Web intelligence is the key to leveraging this multichannel opportunity.

Beth Weesner, CEO of MTS, then moderated a panel discussion including Deborah Nelson of HP, Nancy Bhagat of Intel, and Lauren Flaherty of Juniper Networks. A number of different topics were covered during the course of the discussion, but my favorite topics all revolved around the customer.

• Who owns the customer?
• How do you know if you’re making a difference?
• How do you get your customer more involved?

And even though all of these questions address the topic of the customer, they span everything from organizational alignment to measurement to engagement. You may know the answer to one, but do you know how bring them all together?

Lauren Flaherty made the observation that big enterprises aren’t betting their business on technology, they are betting on relationships. I think these topics and observations all come back to why we as marketers are here in the first place. It’s great to have access to the best technologies and creative designs, but it all has to come back to the needs of the customer.

San Francisco, CA - May 3, 2010 – Marketing Transformation Services (MTS), a strategic consulting firm specializing in Marketing Automation technologies and services, today announced it will host another executive roundtable event on Thursday, May 6, 2010, at the Computer History Museum in the heart of the Silicon Valley, CA.

The Marketing Transformation Services executive roundtable will bring together a roster of world-class speakers from a variety of technology companies including Hewlett Packard, Intel and Juniper Networks, as well as a senior analyst from Forrester Research. The event will provide a thought provoking forum around business executives primary concern with marketing – how to get a return on their investment.

This year’s event will cover common issues that can bog down efficiency, create redundancies and dwindle profits over time, and how to overcome these issues to identify new opportunities that already exist in the organization. Other topics include how to take web intelligence and turn it into a multi-channel strategy, how technology has changed the relationship with customers, how to measure a customer’s experience and bringing together available resources to optimize marketing processes. The event is invitation only.

“I’m passionate about helping Marketer’s drive breakthrough results”, said Founder and CEO, Beth Weesner. “This is the number one area of concern and the real reason why CMO tenure is the shortest of all c-suite executives”.

About MTS
MTS empowers marketing executives to transform their organization with automation and process investments. We show our clients the huge potential for using solutions such as multi-channel campaign management, lead management, work flow management, and financial management. Having worked with clients such as Cisco, eBay, Intel and IBM, MTS defines a roadmap and series of investments that drive outcomes that will lift our clients to a new level of business performance. We believe in measurable business results and are committed to our client’s success. www.marketingtransformation.net

Of course, their vision had one major problem; no one knew how to execute on any of their ideas. The Internet was still in its infancy; targeted marketing was something that took aim at everyone in a zip code, and sales force automation was an alphabetized rolodex.

At the same time, a new term began to emerge called Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM was built on the ideal of building 1 to 1 relationships. CRM aspired to be the “top of the triangle” strategy. Companies should build systems enabling them to embrace their customers and provide them with marketing, customer service, and product delivery that were customized to meet their needs.

Coincidentally, 1993 also saw the founding of Siebel Systems, a company that would lead and dominate the category of CRM software. They created the notion of a three-legged stool of CRM—sales, service and marketing. Increasingly, the term CRM became a description of a technology suite, not a business strategy. Understandable, given that a software sale of 5,000 call center seats is a lot more revenue than a small group of people developing a CRM strategy.

But my experience with global clients such as Dell, IBM, and HP has convinced me that the pendulum is swinging back to a more strategic view of CRM. Marketing leaders are embracing an integrated view of sales and marketing. Increasingly, they are focusing on nurturing and customer life-cycle campaigns that align to the needs and timing of their individual customers. Their goal is to engage them in a conversation as opposed to bludgeoning them with offers that don’t have any meaning.

The most exciting part is as organizations move to a more customer centric model; marketing is often leading the way. By taking a twenty year old vision of a 1 to 1 business model, marketing is making a revolutionary idea a reality that is gaining more momentum every year.

So why does the business world need another blog?  Because we at MTS and the customers that we serve have some important insights and experiences to share.

We have entitled our blog, “Transformation Through Automation.”  Transformation is at the center of our name and the center of what we do for our clients.  It’s what our clients are wanting to do for themselves.  While our projects vary widely (both geographically and functionally), they all share a passion for making marketing perform at a high level for the sponsors who entrust the future growth of their business to the work of those in marketing.

We are starting out this blog with an entry about the “soul of CRM.”  What is it?  Is it a technology–a three-legged stool of marketing, sales, and service?  Is it a broader customer centric strategy that incorporates a wide variety of information driven approaches to maximize the value of each customer.  We here different companies who use this term in different ways.  We also hear a gradual change towards something that is more strategic and with more potential to increase revenue and return on marketing.

Next, we will begin an exciting series on the key components of a marketing automation initiative.  While vendors and technologists focus on things like architecture and integration, we will take a much broader view.  We will start with key drivers of program success like executive sponsorship and oversight.  We have had the opportunity to work with some of the world’s largest marketing automation initiatives and we will share our insights on how executives must become engaged in your efforts to ensure success.

You will hear from myself and some of our core team of consultants here at MTS.  Each of us comes from a different corner of the marketing automation landscape, so each will bring a unique perspective on what is required to achieve success.  What is common for all of us is our passion for the impact that marketing automation brings to those who make investments in technology, process, and people to make marketing more effective.

You will also hear from others who are part of the MTS extended family.  We will include comments and opinions from our clients who have been down the path to transformation.  We will also reach out to our technology partners who are actively building technology that makes marketing more effective with each passing year.

We ask each of you to participate and add to our conversation.  We look forward to feedback and perespectives that go well beyond our ideas and include all of yours as well.

BW