5 Questions with Eric Lehnen

Eric Lehnen is a certified marketing automation and CRM consultant who is the Marketing Lead at Redpath Consulting Group, a sales and marketing technology consulting company. Eric will be speaking at AMA Minnesota’s event, The Future of Marketing: Automation, on January 24. Eric will discuss the path to introducing automation at your organization for the first time and share tips for expanding what you may already have implemented.

We asked Eric Lehnen five questions about marketing automation.

1. What is the most common question you get from companies who are looking to introduce automation for the first time and what do you tell them?
   
   Easily, it is “How do I start?” What they are really asking, is “What am I getting into?” When I hear this question, or hint they are getting at something deeper, I level with them and say Marketing Automation is a powerful tool that will allow you to gain an unfair advantage. To get there, it is a journey. Aside from the obvious license costs, time investment is needed that goes beyond the implementation of the platform.
   
   9 out of every 10 implementations, the company does not have a documented marketing and sales process. Organizations believe that marketing automation is a turn-key platform. The reality is you need to configure the system based on your process. So, companies will realize they should document their process. Although this will delay the project, it is a blessing in disguise too. Without the implementation, a company never would have defined their process. Of course the best practice for ANY organization before implementation is to create a flow chart of each step between lead generation and a new customer.
    
2. Why is automation considered the “next evolution of marketing”?
   
   Organizations will fit in one of three tiers based on their marketing capabilities:
   
   1) Marketing across many mediums
   2) Automation marketing in the mediums
   3) Intelligence of those mediums
   
   For many of us, we are all at the first stage of evolution: we have built a nice website, we are promoting on social media, we are exploring other marketing channels, and we use an email marketing platform. We don’t have something that integrates all of them together under one roof. Automating our marketing across these platforms would put us in the next natural evolutionary stage. Intelligence, the next stage, is the ability to utilize big data and predict the best marketing tactics for our prospects. Most larger organizations have been in this stage it, but it is out of reach for most small and mid-sized organizations.
    
3. Are there any misconceptions about marketing automation that you would like to clear up?
   
   The three main misconceptions I come across are:
   
   1. It does not add leads to your funnel out of thin air. It automates the lead generation process of your marketing channels. To translate your process into the platform, you need to first document your marketing and sales process.
   2. It is not a turn-key system. You need to configure it around your processes. Defining your audiences (hot leads, cold leads, customers), personalizing content, and defining qualification criteria are critical pieces to a value-adding marketing automation platform.
   3. It is not 100% set and forget. You need to use it to drive value from it. There are many ways to define long-term marketing tracks for prospects and customers alike, but each should be treated as a means to an end, a.k.a. a call to action. If you are not getting desired results, build new marketing tracks to engage those prospects.
    
4. Large companies may have difficulty narrowing to one marketing audience. For example, a health care system has their prospective patients, and referring physicians from whom they are looking to build their referral base. Can automation be customized to reach more than one target audience?
   
   Absolutely! This occurs in organizations with multiple business units, products that are mutually exclusive or not, or both a B2B and B2C division. It comes down to defining the criteria for the different audiences. The source of truth for this should be your CRM system. This is why I stress the need for a good data model and clean data to accurately define who a prospect or customer is.
   
   This seems obvious for all of us, but in every project I have been part of, the organization quickly realized had to either clean or re-define an audience, even in a minor way. It is always best practice to define the criteria for each audience and validate it against real data. Without a good data model or clean data you compound the problem and are left with confused prospects, frustrated customers, and a stomach knot that just got tighter. Trust me, I’ve been in the shoes of these organizations and good data is the most important success factor.
    
5. When companies streamline some of their marketing tasks through automation, such as emails and social media, what is some of the important work that they are able to focus more time and energy on in order to build their business?
   
   Most marketers who implement marketing automation will often increase the number of tactics they do within the year. For instance, before marketing automation, the marketing team was only able to manage 10 events a year, a few email campaigns, and a couple of content marketing strategies. Now that they have marketing automation, they learned they could nearly double their capacity because it is much easier to set up. Additionally, marketers get more than time savings. They can finally calculate ROI from campaigns, identify new audiences to market to, and notify sales instantly of new leads. These are the biggest benefits by far.