The best years of my career have been spent as a marketer. I’ve cracked the code on ideas that have made tens of millions for small and mid-sized companies. I love marketing!
But...
Why, when I introduce myself to someone in a networking situation, do I try to avoid the term “marketing?”
The truth?
Marketing has a bad reputation.
People don’t trust marketers. Marketing conjures feelings of manipulation.
Despite the rise of helpful, educational, and valuable content marketing, marketing still has a credibility problem.
It is viewed as a necessary evil by most executives – with good reason.
While marketing automation software can revolutionize the way your business gets found, generates leads, and brings those leads down the funnel, it is often met with skepticism.
While marketers know the value of marketing automation, I’m afraid that getting buy-in is always going to be an uphill battle.
Ready for the good news?
Inside many marketing automation platforms lies a multi-million dollar secret that many marketers and most executives don’t know about.
When most people think about marketing automation, they think about email drip campaigns and landing pages. That covers 1% of what is possible with your marketing software.
Marketing automation is really TOTAL BUSINESS AUTOMATION software.
Try to see it this way…
I’ve been playing Legos a lot with my 4-year old son. He just had a birthday and received a few new Lego sets.
What is the first thing you do when you get a new Lego set? You follow the instructions and build the model shown on the side of the box.
That is fun for a few days. After that, the prim and proper model gets destroyed and the fun begins. We take those pieces and build anything and everything we can imagine - towns, castles, spaceships, and ninja cars. The opportunities are endless.
All it takes is an understanding of how the pieces fit together and a vision.
The same is true for your business.
How would your business be impacted by the efficiency of automating processes beyond marketing? How would it be impacted by also getting rid of tools that you can now fold into your “marketing automation” software?
Realistically, you can’t automate every system (even marketing) completely. Also, not every task in your processes can be handled by the robots in your marketing software. That means you might need to adjust some of your business processes to take advantage of your full toolset.
But, there is still a lot to be gained by shifting your mindset and implementing automation to the fullest extent of your platform.
We met with a 24-person software company today that is going through my HS Sales Success program to automate their sales processes.
The meeting was to review how we are automating their accounts payable and fulfillment processes.
As deals move through their implementation process, tasks are automatically created for specific people in the company depending on a series of deal attributes - such as location, industry, and product. In other words, the right people get the right tasks at the right point in the process. This happens EVERY TIME and the entire team is following the same playbook.
By mapping out their entire set of marketing, sales, and post-sale processes, then overlaying it on top of their marketing automation (HubSpot) platform, they will be able to handle a lot more leads, sales, and implementations without needing to hire more people.
We took 80% of the human admin work out of the process and created a system with fewer human errors, more accountability, and much higher productivity.
Why am I telling you this?
You have a significant opportunity, even if marketing is not a priority for you.
Remember, there is only one model shown on the Lego box. But once you understand how the pieces fit and add a little imagination, your options are limitless on what you can build.
If you shift your thinking from marketing automation to total business automation, you open up a world of new possibilities. With this approach, it's very possible to get 10x the return on your marketing automation investment.