As a veteran of CRM firm Salesforce.com, Fergus Gloster expected to have a quieter time when he quit the firm, but instead he’s heading up the European push for Cloud marketing firm Marketo.
So what persuaded Gloster (a) back into the Cloud game and (b) into a sector of the industry that frankly failed when it was called marketing resource planning or marketing automation? Gloster explains:
“I had a great nine years at Salesforce.com and I’d been off doing my own thing when Marketo knocked on the door. I’d really just left Salesforce.com and I wasn’t really ready to think about something else, but they were persistent. Then they recruited Paul Albright [Marketo Chief Revenue Officer] who I’d met a few times and he said ‘what would it take?’. I said ‘show me the product’ . They did and I loved it. I was a developer once and I could see that they got the essence of everything we had talked about with Software as a Service (SaaS). There was a deep understanding of digital content and how a shift in buying patterns had happened. So the product itself was very good and complemented other products, including Salesforce.com. ”
But why should marketing automation as a category work this time around when it has always failed before? Gloster argues:
“Marketing is an active category. Three years ago you might have thought that marketing automation equals email marketing, but now we get it. The problem that was being solved wasn’t intellectually difficult, but marketing people don’t like to be measured so they ran away. But at the same time you have CFOs asking what they have got for their million dollar marketing spend. There is still a need for education that this is not just about email marketing. It’s our job to articulate the benefits. ”
What’s changed now compared to previous attempts to automate this function is the same driver that enabled Salesforce.com, he adds:
“What has changed is analogous to what allowed Salesforce.com to develop which is a Web 2.0 type interface that allows you to drag and drop. People who use this sort of system are marketing specialists, not techies. It’s all very well for me to say that I understand the system, but marketing people aren’t necessarily the strongest when it comes to exploring technology themselves. But the design and the UI enable them to do the job. Previously they would need to run a campaign and they’d go to IT who would tell them that it’s going to take weeks to do. Allow for some slippage to that and it means you need to tell IT around 3 months in advance. That’s not immediacy, is it? ”
The Cloud delivery model also means that the hefty commitment that was previously required to explore marketing automation has gone away. Gloster says:
“There’s also the SaaS value proposition of use it and if you don’t like it, stop it. Complex systems like ERP and CRM require adoption if they’re going to be useful and that means they need to be easy to use. Problems used to be solved by disparate systems with lots of spreadsheets flowing between them. ”
The other thing that has changed is the relationship between buyers and sellers, argues Gloster:
“The way people buy has changed. If you were looking to buy a hi tech solution for £20k five years ago you’d call me directly then maybe pay analysts to make a recommendation for you. Now you’d do your own research, you’d look on the social networks to see what’s been said so that by the time you come to me, you can know more about the product than I do! So as a marketing person, I need to get ahead of you and stay in front of you, then approach you when the time is right. I don’t want to do that when it’s too early for you to make a decision or to late when you tell me the decision is made. That’s a huge challenge for the marketing department. ”
One lesson that might be learned this time around is that companies won’t improve their marketing just by buying some technology, any more than orgnisations ‘did’ CRM by buying some Siebel software. Gloster explains:
“This is exactly the problem with all systems and technologies and it just becomes all the more evident in the SaaS world. People buy a CRM package and they say ‘now I’m doing CRM’. Then the CFO says in a year’s time that there’s a renewal bill come in and asks if you’re really using the CRM package and…The acquisition of technology in its own right is no longer a valid option. With SaaS, you find out all the quicker that it’s not being used. The difference now is that whereas you used to just buy Siebel, this time you won’t end up with shelfware for years. Cloudware only lasts a couple of months. ”
So it’s about a new realism in which organisations realise that technology is there as an enabler, not an end in its own right. Or as Gloster states:
“Marketo will not make you a better marketer. You have to own your own content. But we will help you to understand it and its impact better. ”
tags for Making your marketing work - in the Cloud
