Out of the Fog Marketing

Excellent article. One prerequisite that I would like to add is that you should have enough leads in your database already. If not, also plan some activities to fill the DB, such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click, and registration pages with attractive offers.
 

Good point Jep. Having a clean in-house mailing list is a prerequisite especially since most of the marketing automation firms demand at least a single opt-in confirmation.
 

You make some good points. With the dynamic economy, we find it is most important to implement a system that allows your sales team to focus on the leads that they can close right now without having to learn a new system, and a system that can scale with your needs when you are ready. By having a system that is deeply integrated with Salesforce.com or another CRM system, your sales folks can focus on hot leads and not go chaising everyone. And let the marketing efforts focus on nurturing prospects through a funnel. While Constant Contact, Vertical Response and Infusion Soft are good at batch-n-blast, they are really best suited for small retail, insurance office, or folks with a very limited prospect base or extremely short sales cycle where nurturing prospects is not on the radar. Working with approx. 30 clients who run demand generation programs on a national and ww level, our team has found that the more the system is focused on sales people, the better your team will leverage the efforts of your marketing activities.

There are some systems that will even let you look "up the funnel", to see leads that may not be "scored", or have not yet met a certain criteria, but will be soon.

You'd be surprised that some of the more sophisticated systems focus on ease of use, and actually start at $1,000+ per month. Getting things like lead scoring, automatic data cleansing, or field normalization, starts to pay for itself 10x especially when you have a small team. If you can get a solution to help you focus on sales now, and scale your marketing efforts as your team can create more content, then being able to hire content experts such as yourself will be very justified since the sales team will be spending all their time closing business instead of submitting the prospects to a continual beating of the same content again and again.