Creating the culture part two: skills you need to implement marketing automation software

Marketing automation solutions alone cannot get you the marketing performance transformation you're hoping for - you need to get the company culture and skills aligned with it for true success.

To find out how you can do that, read the next in this this two-part blog post series. 

In part one, I looked at the skills required to implement marketing automation software and why a transformation on a cultural level needs to occur before any system can be successfully implemented. Here i explain the next steps in that process.

Appoint cross-functional project teams

By having a project implementation team that's not just made up of marketing and IT then you can raise the new solution's profile from the start and have evangelists sharing information about how great it is outside of your structured communications plan.

And we all know how important word-of-mouth marketing is.

As Yahoo! Small Business points out, marketing automation has a variety of uses, and it isn't specifically made to benefit a single department.

Get sales, product development and customer service involved as the work they do should influence marketing messages and the leads you generate and data you gather should inform what they do too.

Follow the template in this article from Marketo to assign the right roles to everyone in the team, which should be made up of:

• Decision makers.

• Executors.

• Supporting players.

When you have the right team in place for the implementation project, once the system is live the appetite for making it work should have been well and truly whetted.

Ensure relevant staff get the training they need

This really is mainly for the marketing department as the rest of the business should not need to get directly involved in the system management as they will just get the resulting data from it.

Leads will be allocated within the CRM system and copies of all communications attached to customer records so everyone will be able to see the results.

The way your marketing team has worked in the past means they won't have the skills needed to make the most of the marketing automation system, so as well as the solution training they'll need to master the system itself.

They'll need some digital marketing training to develop new skills to surround it:

• Inbound marketing skills: check out these posts. 
  

• Marketing analytics skills.

• Social media marketing skills.

• Content marketing skills.

Cultural transformation

By paying real attention to these three areas as you make your plans for the move to marketing automation you should see: 

• Excellent adoption rates.

• Healthy ongoing engagement rates.

• Improvements to your marketing-generated sales pipeline.

To make sure that the initial excitement and structured usage of the system doesn't wane, check out Econsultancy's Marketing Autpmation best practice guide, that way you can be sure that you'll continue to make the most of the advanced marketing opportunities the solution provides.