There are a range of marketing automation tools available for business and Parrot Analytics VP marketing Samuel Stadler says he has seen the best and the worst of these.
He tells Digital Nation about the organisation’s digital transformation journey, and the lessons learnt through marketing automation.
Stadler says that HubSpot's solution has granted the company more punching power, and has become a critical application in their marketing technology stack.
However, one of the biggest challenges that Stadler has experienced with automation tools is the common lack of intuitive design and functionality.
“I’ve used multiple marketing automation tools, and some of them are terrible,” says Stadler.
"The types of products that I knew would be difficult to work with in a high performance, high growth, relatively young enterprise are the ones where you need an entire person just to run them. Certainly Marketo comes to mind."
Stadler says these days Parrot Analytics' marketing automation solution allows the company to be targeted and purposeful, to get the best possible deals, and respond to leads appropriately.
“In the team that I manage now, we are very lean on digital, that allows us to really scale up across channels across campaigns across ad types. But most importantly, focus the entire enterprise on the source of truth, which is the CRM.”
Moving forward, Stadler highlights over-automation as a potential limitation. He also relays the importance of good data governance.
“In terms of data governance, some of the things that we have kind of seen to work really well is to just make sure that you have a leader that is in charge of that area,” he says.
“It does come down to just being really good with CSV, exports and imports. And using lists, effectively dynamic lists so that you can actually get to the heart of the matter, which is, do we have clean data, do we have data that we that we trust, because, you know, it all rests on that.”
“If you cannot have a trust in the data, then... you're just scaling up rubbish.”
