In the past year, I’ve seen about half a dozen organizations that have dropped about 25% of the “marketing budget” on marketing technology – CRM and/or marketing automation – without anyone on staff or under contract that knows how to use the technology.
My recommendation is that if you can’t afford to hire or contract with someone that knows how to use it, don’t buy it. You wind up in the position of trying to explain to your higher-ups why you still can’t get things done more efficiently now that you have the tech.
This isn’t a new observation on my part either. I’ve seen this time and time again over the past 10-15 years. But in the past year, the frequency of occurrences has increased significantly. Typically the rationale has been “…another person will cost six-figures fully loaded but the technology should run about half that and we have all read the articles about how the technology increases performance so…”
No processes or just bad processes combined with a team that has little to no database experience or hands-on experience with the latest shiniest marketing technology will not generate better results due to the presence of technology that they don’t know how to use.
Seems simple and yet…
