At the 2014 Dreamforce event last fall, Leadspace and Bluewolf presented the results of their most recent State of Salesforce study. We asked more than 1,000 marketing executives to quantify the value derived from their marketing automation (MA) investments.
The results showed that only 7 percent are seeing good, measurable ROI from their MA investments — a shockingly abysmal rate, even among the fairly cynical marketing crowd, putting the success of MA on par with the Congressional approval rating.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we are all going to rip out our marketing automation platforms.
But something has to change in order for the MA industry, currently valued at less than $10 billion, to start seeing the valuations of a company like Salesforce, originally founded on sales force automation and now valued at around $40 billion.
So what differentiates sales force automation from marketing automation? I would argue that the pivotal difference lies in the data and intelligence layer. With sales force automation, the salesperson provides the data, insights, and analytics to make the right call. Salespeople assemble relevant data, sift through insights, and decide what to do, how to proceed — or not. A system to manage this process — and provide insights back to management on the pipeline — creates incredible efficiency.
The future of marketing automation depends on data analytics at scale
