The term marketing automation has been around for some years now, and many (like us) in the industry believe this term to be pretty commonplace. Truthfully, however, I can’t tell you the number of times we get blank stares or bits of awkward pauses when we say ‘marketing automation’ with prospective customers, and even prospective channel partners. Then I will say something like “What if you could identify the real prospects who are visiting your site, the things they are interested in, and how often they are visiting? Then you could follow up with an integrated email campaign targeted at a variety of segments based on their interests, behaviors and feedback? And provide scoring and nurturing of these leads within your system, all the while tying it into your CRM system and passing it on to salespeople to turn that information into revenue?” The blank stare becomes a smile, a nod or a light coming on. That’s marketing automation. That’s what we do at Net-Results. It may take longer to explain exactly what we do and how we make their lives easier with our system, but to me it is much better than throwing the term out there that people assume everyone knows.
