We’ve been helping more of our customers with Marketing Automation Process Definition lately.  It seems obvious… well done, marketing automation gets quite complicated.  When you add in Executive Change, Software Upgrades, Personnel Turnover, and just plain old communication, keeping on top of the new world of Eloqua and CRM and maybe a couple of other systems without processes becomes almost impossible.

But still many marketers are unused to this level of complexity and have yet to realize that creating processes that successfully bridge the sales-marketing gap, communicate well to both executives and agencies doesn’t come easily.

If you’re still at the very early stages of Marketing Automation, perhaps you and everyone in your department can still keep it all in your head.  But at some point you’ll want to convey what’s happening to executives, new team members, or agencies, and when you do, well defined processes are the answer.

This cartoon makes the point well.