The million-dollar question: how do I sell marketing automation to the CXO in charge of the marketing budget?
Whether you’re on the sell side of marketing automation or just a CXO hoping to convince his or her CEO of the investment, it can be a challenge. People have always been suspicious of anything too automated, and marketing has always been such a personality-driven profession.
Ironically, marketing automation would be one of the most turnkey solutions for marketing pain points (which practically every company has, regardless of size) in an era of ever-tightening expenses. A software program literally designed from the ground up to be a virtual content manager who works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Why wouldn’t you want to invest in that?
In fact, that should be your first selling point to any CXO.
1. Impress CTO with the facts
Even if the CEO approves of marketing automation software, the CTO will ultimately determine whether it sees proper use. You can’t do marketing automation right unless your Chief Technology Officer is on board with the program. Integrating marketing automation with existing systems is a very challenging process.
The trick is to convince the powers that be of the true, lasting value of marketing automation. And the best way to sell to the CTO is to impress them with the facts. They’re too busy managing IT to really understand how marketing automation will help the company (and IT) unless you clearly state the facts. How will it automate existing systems? How will it pool data better?
2. Impress CFO with the numbers
The next person you want to approach is the CFO. The person in charge of the money is usually more concerned with top-line growth, margins, overhead, and profitability than even the CEO. Fortunately, almost all marketing automation software comes with a robust Revenue Performance Management (RPM) system.
RPMs allow companies to manage and follow customers throughout their purchaseing process. This increases the reliability of financial forecasts and leads to rapid, profitable growth, more revenue, and a shorter sales cycle. You can easily look up RPM gains online. (Or check out my post on the stats behind marketing automation.)
You also want to think about what keeps the CFO up at night. Those are the questions marketing automation needs to answer.
3. Approach CEO with hard data and support
After approaching the CTO and CFO (and maybe even the COO), the CEO should be your next stop. If you’re trying to pitch SaaS to a prospective client, this is a given. But if you’re trying to convince your own CEO of marketing automation’s value, the best way to do so is by getting the rest of the CXO team on your side.
What keeps your CEO up at night? All the big questions. Like how the company is going to meet its sales goals, and what competitors are doing. CEOs are constantly swimming upstream against a current of uncertainties and questionable metrics, so anything that can better predict, measure, and manage sales and marketing (with robust data to back it up) will be welcome.
4. Make CEO your biggest ally
Obviously, you can’t do that by just talking about marketing automation and what it does. You need to really break down the benefits of marketing automation as a whole and of RPM in particular. How does it analyze and forecast the movement of revenue through an integrated marketing and sales funnel? How long does it take to implement processes and adopt better practices for each stage of the funnel? Can performance be benchmarked and accurately measured?
Explain that RPM holds everyone in sales and marketing accountable to agreed-upon, common revenue goals. It reduces marketing spend and lowers the sales headcount, saving up to $50,000 per year on potentially bad hires. Most importantly, it guides prospects through the buying process by delivering the right messages at the right time and allows you to make better predictions. Lastly, it tells you how it does all of this with simple, insightful data.
A bullet point list would look something like this. “Marketing automation…”
- Lowers marketing and sales costs
- Shortens sales cycles
- Increases sales per customer
- Enables more predictability and better forecasts
- Leads to better overall sales and marketing ROI
5. Sell it in
If you can confidently answer all of his or her questions, the CEO will be on board. But that doesn’t mean that it’s automatically all hands on deck. In order to really get buy in from the rest of the team, you need to sell it in to all of marketing, sales, and IT. Hopefully you would have already sown the seeds to make this an easy transition.
But it’s important to keep in mind that CXOs aren’t the only people that matter. Marketing automation greatly impacts the habits of employees, and you shouldn’t just expect them to automatically adapt. Instead, it would be best to put together a presentation of all the data you already showed the CXOs and distribute it through the company.
Make sure everyone knows why you’re making such a big, disruptive change. And make sure they understand that it will not just increase revenue, but make everyone a little bit better at their jobs, too.
Do you have a marketing automation sell-in success story? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear it.
