Delivering great customer experiences is every marketer’s dream. And for this, marketers need space to create impactful strategies. Marketing automation platforms lift the heavy workload and help marketers gain insights to meet the objectives. If you’re on the same page, you have probably considered or even finalised incorporating a marketing automation platform to your B2B business. We must say that you’re on the right path but probably curious about its outcomes. Also, the adoption of the software by your employees is another very important aspect to ensure your investment is worth its while.
According to Email Monday, about 90% of the agencies currently using automation tools say that their automation strategy has been successful. So, if you don’t invest in marketing automation fully, you are very likely to use only a fraction of the ocean of its capabilities. Many vendors who offer basic training for executives and third party trainers are equally helpful while installing the software. If you’re searching for the best ways to get the marketing automation software adopted by your team, you have arrived at the right page!
Let us introduce you to some of the top-notch marketing automation platforms.
Some of the best performing automation platforms are HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Leadsquare, Pardot and so on. In fact, Meghan Headley, VP of Research at TrustRadius, said that HubSpot has been awarded the Top Ranked marketing automation software, an achievement that was entirely based on customer feedback! HubSpot training provides everything including driving more traffic, converting more prospects into leads, fixing leaky funnels, and customer retention.
Marketo training will kick-start your automation experience right from the beginning by helping you with Marketo implementation and integration, aligning your sales and marketing tasks for getting the best outputs, training and education on web development, design studio, strategic workshops and functional training, analysing data, and reporting the results. Speaking of Salesforce training, you’ll get strategic guidance on developing actionable strategy, implementation and integration of the software, change enablement, app development, and more. If you are on board with Pardot or Leadsquared, your employees will get the best of implementation and integration training for marketing campaigns including content strategy to SEO, social media, and lead nurturing. Besides this, each training session will help your employees learn through the experiences of the experts on the mistakes they need to avoid and methods to adopt in order to reap maximum ROI.
Read next: A Complete Marketing Automation Guide By Transfunnel
Tips For a Successful Executive Training Program
Before you even spoke about the software, your employees were handling most of the work manually and it's obvious that while your company grows, you’ll need sophisticated technology. Since marketing automation is new software, you can expect some of your employees not seeming very sure about the idea of using it. That’s quite natural because it will change the way they have been working until now. But we have some foolproof tips on how to engage your teams to ease their way while developing automation skills. Take a look!
1. Inform, Educate and Inspire - Key to a Successful Adoption
Marketing automation tools may look daunting to your team and may affect the adoption rate of the software. To increase user adoption, you will have to inform, educate and inspire your marketing and sales teams who are the end-users of the tool. Inadequate information and ineffective or no training are a few reasons why businesses do not see the results that they had expected while installing the marketing automation software. In the coming years, automation is going to make great changes to the industry. Therefore, arranging for your employees to get hands-on experience with the marketing automation platform is the best way to receive fruitful results.
2. Get the Performers on Board
Before starting the training program, it’s crucial to have a great team by your side that will happily handle automation. For this, you need to choose executives who are quick learners or have some background experience in using such tools. Having a team that understands the cultural values and goals of your company will help in understanding the marketing automation process better. For small or medium-sized businesses, it will be very useful to bring flexible and hardworking staff on board where multiple roles can be subsumed to one person. This way, even a small but efficient team can do wonders while finishing tasks within the stipulated time frame.
3. Build the Right Team
If you’re thinking that you’ll need a team of 10-20 people for automating your marketing activities, that’s not actually true. It all depends on the skills of your team members and your business needs. A leading data security industry like Websence has only 3 members in its marketing automation team: Email Specialist, Analytical specialist, and IT support. Besides, harmony between the teams is also of utmost importance while the process is ongoing. So, focus on getting the right team put together for the best results.
4. Identify the Skill Gaps
To identify the scope of training, you need to identify the skills that your team has and the ones they will be needing to become an expert at using the platform. To fill this gap, you may have to plan out the blueprint of the entire training process, which may include hiring consultants, conduct training programs, and sometimes, recruit people. As we mentioned earlier, getting members with some background experience in marketing automation will narrow down the skills gap and make the process faster.
5. Get your Employees and Service Providers to Jam Together
The service provider’s team has the knowledge of everything that the automation tool can do and your employees are the ones to be trained. Making them work closely with each other will be the best thing to do. The service provider team will know the level at which your team needs to be trained and they can focus on each individual based on their needs and doubts. Also, your team can find the exact points where the implementation of automation gets tricky and needs further assistance.
Getting the provider guide your team will be beneficial to explore all the possible areas where automation can help make marketing, especially inbound marketing, easier.
6. Different Teams, Different Training Sessions
Marketing automation is something that runs through all the teams, be it your sales, marketing or the customer care team; each one of them needs to be well-trained to run the program based on their respective tasks. For example, the marketing team would like to know how automation helps with reaching the right customer, gathering and reporting data, lead management, and creating the right workflow.
Similarly, the sales and customer care teams have their own tasks for which they need to learn how automating would prove to be a success. Hence, it's best that you arrange for different training sessions for different teams.
7. Get Your Calendars Aligned With the Training
Remember that training the teams is a process and takes time. But this doesn’t mean that your running tasks have to be halted for that duration. Make sure you schedule the training for your employees in a way that doesn’t disturb the ongoing business work. For this, it is helpful to align your team member's calendars with the training. You may also schedule it based on the tasks in hand.
For example, if the marketing team is manually sending outbound emails one day, a session on how to do it with the tool can be conducted and they can learn the drill while the manual task is still going on and notice the difference themselves. However, we do not suggest cutting down on training hours because the better the training, the greater the automation tool utilisation from a long-term perspective.
8. Get Them to Look at the Big Picture
It is important to include behaviour change as one of the important parts of training your teams. Explain to them how using a marketing automation tool is not a short-term thing but a long-term shot to make your business grow much faster. Elaborate on how automation is greatly aligned with your company’s mission and how it will generate more ROI with time. They will also be able to understand how important it is to introduce sophisticated tools and technology when the business evolves into a bigger brand, especially for small to medium-sized businesses.
9. RFP is crucial
The request for proposal is an important aspect of procuring a marketing automation software. An RFP describes the terms and conditions of interacting with your vendor’s sales and support team for future assistance whenever the need arises and also in case of emergency or critical situations. It will also help your team stay up-to-date with the latest marketing tools, such as automation management, SEO, and social media. An RFP lets both, you and vendor make the best out of this partnership.
Quick refresher
Training your team to optimally use the automation tool goes hand in hand with your company’s growth; the better the training, the better the growth curve. Getting the right trainer just makes the most complex things appear simple and user-friendly. We, at Transfunnel, help ambitious marketers like you achieve their goals well in advance by providing world-class training to executives. So, let’s catch up and see how amazing our teams and our coffee are. We're only one ping away!
