Marketing Software Selection Guide
There are a lot of best practices guides for choosing the right marketing solution. Some offer great advice on what to do and why you should do it. Things like:
- Define requirements
- Issue and score Request For Proposals (RFP)
- View and score software demos
- Ensure technology compatibility
- Request proposals
- Check customer references
But the biggest thing missing from "How to Guides" for software vendor selection . . . is the How. How do you define requirements? How do you specify investment objectives? How do you create the RFP?
That's our intention here.
We've co-opted best practices from a variety of disciplines—thoughtful marketing strategies, modern MarTech tools, purpose-built apps such as lead management systems and marketing clouds—to craft an approach to a structured software selection that provides specific answers to the all-critical question of How.
Using marketing functions shared by a cadre of Marketing Automation and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, we'll take you through a systemic process of software evaluation. We'll present a methodology that combines the best software selection practices from a range of disciplines, to offer a simple way to ensure that the marketing application you select achieves the results you want.
A Marketing Best Practices Approach
Best practices in marketing software evaluation include several key disciplines and skills which are directly attributed to successful outcomes. Marketing vendor selection should begin with three key fundamentals of precision requirements, clear vendor communication and project management, for without these essentials, vendor selection is uncontrolled and uncertain, and the results often disappointing.
- Precision requirements. In product design, quality depends on a precisely specified design. The same is true when you develop your business and software requirements: use case by use case, function by function, step by step. We've taken the core principles of product design, simplified them, and applied them to our mission here.
- Clear communication. Once you know what you want to accomplish, you have to precisely communicate it to your potential vendors. We've taken the basic values of the rigorous RFP—clarity, conformity and control—and made them a natural part of the marketing software selection process.
- Project management. The project management disciplines you'll impose on the implementation process need to be brought to bear during the selection process. The issues you face are the same—milestones, resources, dependencies—and the response to those issues must be as rigorous.
Let's look more closely at each of these.
Software Selection Project Precision
For the Marketing Automation vendor selection process, precision means tightly and totally defining your workflows, processes and tasks. Here are the steps to follow:
- Draw a Picture. Bring each functional group together (for example, all the telemarketers or all the campaign managers) and set in front of them a simple challenge: "Draw a picture of what you do." It may look something like this:
The boxes are the Actors: in this case the Actors are the Inside Sales Rep (A) and the Spreadsheet (B). The arrows are the Actions: in this case the action is a data entry function. Dotted Lines are the Aftereffects: the impact on downstream processes. Beneath the Arrows is the estimated time it takes to complete the Action.
- Create a Business Process Narrative. This drawing then needs to be translated into a step-by-step narrative, highlighting the Actors, Actions and Aftereffects.
- Inventory Technologies. Document what business software applications, desktop software programs, hardware or other productivity or automation tools are used in the process.
- Identify Impacts. Some actions impact other processes—direct or downstream. It's critical, for instance, to understand that an email campaign will impact a trade show presence.
- Define the Performance Metrics. Any software vendor selection will rest on demonstrated ROI. In order for your vendors to help you with this, you have to give them real numbers.
Clear Communications
Request For Proposals (RFPs) are tortuous to respond to, and equally tortuous to create. Done well, they can be clearly communicated statements of specific requirements and, because of their standardization, an efficient process for vendor selection.
They also ensure that the procurement process remains objective and produces the best result. There's no reasonable way to predict exactly how you should phrase your own specific RFP questions, but making the RFP document more like a communication process and less of a check box exercise will clearly engage the vendor and produce superior results. Here's a sample structure.
- Did you read and do you understand the function we've described?
- Did you read and do you understand the specific and measurable goals we want to achieve?
- Can your application directly and without customization achieve them?
- Describe the specific product functionality or modules that will achieve each of our goals.
- Describe the specific workflow processes by which your solution will achieve each goal.
- Describe, in days, the length of time to implement your proposed solution to accomplish our goals.
- Describe, in days, the training necessary for us to become proficient with your proposed solution.
- Estimate the length of time for us to reach investment break even on your proposed solution.
- Describe how your marketing program will interact with our legacy systems (i.e., CRM or ERP system).
Take note that while a weighted and prioritized functional requirements document is essential to uncover those items that any particular system does not accommodate, the above questions go beyond volumes of check box requirements to gain a more qualitative understanding of how the marketing program achieves the company's top goals and objectives.
Steering the project toward the top goals, and not getting totally immersed in line item functional requirements, is proven to result in a more strategic product selection that generates superior ROI.
Project Management
Preparing to select a marketing solution is a process that must be methodically managed to achieve predicted results. There are multiple stakeholders that must be recognized and included in the process — including the executive team, sales, customer service, IT and others. Communication to stakeholders and potential vendors is an ongoing responsibility.
Information has to be gathered, distilled, standardized and then used to fuel and support the process described here. Statistical and financial data, without which ROI is a fantasy, has to be gathered (and sometimes created). In the methodology we're presenting here, project management is key to mitigating risk and achieving forecasted results — and includes the following functions.
- Securing executive sponsorship to promote the vision and purpose of the marketing automation system, and allocate resources.
- Assembling a software selection project team with representatives from each stakeholder group.
- Identifying a clear project scope and success metrics, and preventing scope creep during the project.
- Gaining consensus among the stakeholders and project team of the analytics needed to measure return, and the specific investment objectives to be reached.
- Facilitating the group meetings from which the process diagrams emerge.
- Reading, understanding and translating those diagrams into business process narratives.
- Knowing what the marketing automation software really is, and coordinating technical information related to each element of the defined solution.
- Handling contacts with vendors.
- Keeping project schedules (including response deadlines) managed and intact.
- Identifying project deviations at the earliest opportunity and implementing course corrections timely.
The Practical Approach to Requirements Definition
Now let's apply these principles to a function within the Marketing organization: lead distribution.
In our scenario, we have a company where leads come in from multiple sources, and are forwarded to an inside sales team of 5 people. They qualify each lead, perform the appropriate triage, update relevant information about the lead and send sales-ready leads to the field reps.
Step One—Draw a Picture
Based on a request from Lynda, the selection team Project Manager, the five Inside Reps come together over a white board session and discuss how leads come to them, and how they handle them. There are variations but they are able to reach a simple diagram that they all agree tells an accurate story. One of them takes a cell phone photo of the whiteboard and emails it to Lynda.
Step Two—Create a Process Narrative
Lynda prints out the diagram and creates a business process narrative that describes it. She uses blue type to indicate an Actor, red type to indicate an Action, and green type to indicate an Aftereffect.
A lead comes in from a variety of sources.
The Inside Rep enters the information into a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet is exported to a sales tracking database.
Inside Rep takes the call and marketing qualifies the lead.
Inside Rep sends out any information requested and call ends.
Inside Rep records the event in a spreadsheet.
Inside Rep alerts the Field rep of the lead assignment.
The Field rep calls the lead.
Inside Rep updates a status document for management visibility.
Step Three—Create a Summary
Lynda writes a brief summary of the function. Inbound leads are handled by an Inside Sales Rep, who marketing-qualifies the lead, records it, passes it on to the appropriate field rep, and updates a lead management report.
Step Four—Identify Technologies
Based on a request from Lynda, the technical team assigned to the selection project lists both the current technical infrastructure, and any other requirements or IT preferences they may have.
Step Five—Business Impact
As the individual functions are run through this process, it becomes clear where the impact they have on downstream processes occurs. First, entering information into the sales tracking report impacts sales statistics. Second, and more importantly, this impacts the Field Rep, who now must contact the Lead.
Step Six—Identify the Metrics
Based on the Action-Actor-Aftereffect analysis of Lead Distribution, the selection team determines that they want to see improvement in both task elements and process elements. Specifically, they want to apply sales lead distribution best practices to see a reduction in the time and cost of handling the inbound lead, and they want to further streamline processes to reduce the amount of leads lost due to a variety of reasons. They've analyzed both and established goals of:
- 15% reduction in the cost of handling leads; and
- 50% reduction in lost leads.
To determine what each vendor can commit to, they provide them the basic metrics they used to set their goals.
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Lead distribution has an operational impact as well. A poor distribution process results in lost or poorly tended leads. So in this case we're going to add another set of metrics: these focused on lost lead analytics.
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Creating the Final Requirements Document
That's Lynda's last task here: she has to take the information she's been provided and assemble it into the RFP. This particular key process page may look something like:
Lead Distribution Functional Workflow
Inbound leads are handled by an Inside Sales Rep, who marketing-qualifies the lead, records it, passes it on to the appropriate field rep, and a updates a lead management report.
Process Description
- A lead comes in from a variety of sources.
- The Inside Rep enters the information into a spreadsheet.
- Inside Rep takes the call and marketing qualifies the lead.
- Inside Rep sends out any information requested and call ends.
- Inside Rep records the event in a spreadsheet.
- Inside Rep alerts the Field rep of the lead assignment.
- Inside Rep updates a status document for management visibility.
Note: The two manual (green) processes identified in the prior session have been excluded.
Data To Be Used For Cost Savings Calculations and ROI
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Questions For Vendor Response:
- Did you read and do you understand the function we've described?
- Did you read and do you understand the specific and measurable goals we want to achieve?
- Can your marketing technology directly and without customization achieve these goals?
- Describe the specific product functionality or modules that will achieve these goals.
- Describe the specific workflow processes by which your solution will achieve this goal.
- Describe, in days, the length of time to implement your solution to accomplish our goal.
- Describe, in days, the training necessary for us to become proficient with your solution.
- Estimate the length of time for us to reach investment break even on your proposed solution.
- Describe how your marketing program will interact with our legacy SFA system.
Of course this is only one key process of several. And while flushing out this level of detail is very time consuming, it is also the single greatest method to actually achieve the desired result. The upside here is that when multiple processes are completed and aligned, the marketing technology will drive significant revenue growth.
The process we've described here requires discipline. It forces you to think through, in a systemic fashion, the key business processes you want to impact with marketing automation software, and the prioritized and measurable results you expect to achieve. And it clearly spells it all out to your potential vendors, thereby eliminating confusion and miscommunication. The result is a clear and comprehensive methodology for finding, selecting and succeeding with your Marketing Automation software solution.