By Adam Sharp, director, Clevertouch

I recently visited a highly successful UK based IT company, a leader in their field with over 150 blue chip clients, including Microsoft, Debenhams, bmi, and Avis among them. We were discussing their sales pipeline and marketing funnel and how to make it more larger and more efficient.
 
Their challenge was that, despite their 10 year history in their UK marketplace and a great reputation amongst their existing customers, they still found it hard to get in front of IT Directors and CIOs and they themselves considered their own awareness as a thought leader much lower than it should be.
 
As you would expect from a technology service delivery organization, their processes and workflows were superb, genuinely the best we had seen in the industry, but what was clear was that their marketing lacked a little creativity and there was little depth (and volume) to their marketing funnel. This was most unusual as companies we visit are usually stronger on the creativity and ideas but weaker on their marketing workflows and automation.
 
Like many organizations they had moved to email marketing as an efficient form of communication; and while email is very useful, (after all we use it ourselves), too many organisations are becoming over-reliant on it.  Too many organizations are adopting an 'email-response- lead-handover to sales' process.
 
For most organizations the email marketing pendulum has swung too far. The marketing concept of 'favourability through familiarity' was coined before the indiscriminate blanket of email campaigns commenced.
 
Email is not necessarily the most relevant method to grab the attention and engage in dialogue with a CIO. We conducted some research recently and found that the average CIO in a FTSE-100 company receives over 100 unsolicited contacts per day. We encouraged the company in question to develop a Buyer Persona of their ideal CIO and from this we came up with eight creative ways to address them, guess what, email wasn't one of them!
 
We also encouraged them to breakdown their Marketing Funnel as they do their Sales Pipeline. Many organizations use stages in the Sales Pipeline as a predictor of confidence in future sales revenue, be it in terms of Percentages or stages of likelihood & confidence such as Suspect, Prospect, Upside, and Commit. Very few B2B companies break down the marketing funnel in the same way, we think of it as a load balancing exercise and we encourage and help Marketing Organizations to develop up to five levels to their own Marketing Funnel.   
 
Again an email marketing platform is an inefficient platform to do this, it provides just two levels to the marketing funnel and 'prospects' is one of these, this is simply not enough to provide breadth to  your marketing campaigns and depth to you marketing funnel.
 
For depth and width we recommend B2B marketers look to deploy a more comprehensive marketing automation platform, the costs won't necessarily by that much more expensive than an email platform (whose very business model is usually built around driving email volume) but a true marketing automation platform can incorporate multiple activities including email, inbound web activity, PR campaigns, telemarketing, Market Research, Direct Mail, Exhibitions and Partner Marketing all from one underlying database, this saves the Marketing Manager a lot of time with integrated campaign delivery and provides the Marketing Director with one unified reporting dashboard.
 
An efficient Marketing Automation platform will also map nicely into your CRM system and while technologies such as Treehouse Interactive, Manticore Technologies and Eloqua are all positioned to address slightly different B2B needs, one of their underlying commonalities is that they all look at activity by individual and not by campaign vehicles, so you can predict the impact of your marketing activity and the strength of your marketing funnel. Add to this the additional benefit that they each use the same underlying datafields as the most popular CRM tools in the marketplace then the alignment between sale and marketing can be much more dynamic, seamless and efficient.
 
Just by thinking beyond email, it is easy to build depth and variety into your campaigns in a way that can guide prospects through the buying process as they themselves want to be guided, all the while enhancing your own marketing campaign success rates.