What Lucille Ball Can Teach Us About Marketing Automation

Before the internet and social networks, buyers had limited ways to obtain the purchase information they needed, so the seller controlled the buying process. But then, buyers moved into the power position. They could access the information they wanted on their own online, anywhere and at any time. And they could delay engaging with selling representatives until they knew as much (or more) than the salesperson did. For example, think about how you approach buying a car. You don't go to a dealer until you know exactly what model you want, and how much you want to pay, right?

To address the challenge, Marketing started to play a larger role in the revenue process. They nurtured relationships with early-stage prospects, and tracked buyer behaviors to see the signs of when a buyer is becoming sales-ready.

But it doesn't scale manually

However, this solution posed a challenge of its own: the problem of scale. Self-empowered buyers demand relevant, personalized conversations on their own time-frame. If you don't provide that experience, they're likely to opt out of your communications. But how do you manage individual dialogues with hundreds of thousands, even millions, of potential customers?

This is precisely why having a marketing automation platform is so critical for today's modern marketers. There literally isn't any other way to keep up with the demands of modern marketing. As Lucille Ball famously demonstrated at a candy factory, attempts to implement such massive processes without the right systems quickly create colossal messes and lost opportunities.

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It's like Marketo's CEO Phil Fernandez wrote in his book Revenue Disruption: 'In a business of any size ' especially one with an engaging web and social media presence ' buyer interactions can number in the thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions. Without the right tools to automate the planning, execution, and measurement, even the hardest-working marketer can be overwhelmed by the complexity.'

How do you handle scale and complexity without technology?