Intermediate/ Digest...

1. Marketing Strategy
What stage of marketing automation — if any — have you reached to date? Is your marketing team logistically ready to take a bigger leap into marketing automation? Are they emotionally ready?

2. Cross-Functional Alignment
The next step is to actively align marketing and sales so that both teams are working toward a unified goal. Cross-functional alignment (CFA) exercises create synergy so that both teams can get on board with marketing automation drivers.

3. Measurement and Reporting
A consulting team should assess your key reporting metrics with the objective of better measuring future success. Ultimately, this aspect of strategic consulting is the one that builds your business case — a tangible deliverable you can show your leadership team, which includes a competitive analysis and full return on investment analysis.

4. Systems and Technology
Evaluate your technology stack to understand the impact it’s currently having on your marketing automation strategy.

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Intermediate/ Digest...

While CRM, marketing automation, and Web analytics systems have been the foundational elements in the past, do tag management systems (TMS) vendors become the nucleus of new clouds, or atoms of old ones in the future ? They've sure been making a lot of news of late, with large funding rounds for Ensighten and Tealium and the acquisition of Tag Man (by Ensighten). These vendors see themselves as the natural place to collect and move data around to other CA systems, and have product names like Audience Stream. However, none of these companies see themselves, so far, building applications for higher up the stack. Rather, they see themselves as the enablers of convergence. But TMS applications are also part of the Google and Adobe clouds, which will present some interesting challenges for vendors and buyers alike. Will one buy TMS grouting from one store and app bricks from another?

Beyond apps and technology, there has been a convergence of process in the sales and marketing app space, anchored by CRM, but driven by social apps like Radian6, Viral Heat, and HootSuite; sales intelligence companies, like InsideView and Data.com; marketing automation (MA) applications like Eloqua, Marketo, and HubSpot; and email service providers (ESPs) Silver Pop, Responsys, and ExactTarget systems, which all start to overlap. Salesforce, for example, owns one of each and has others waiting on the sidelines, like Pardot. In fact, there is less and less difference between an ESP and MA app at all these days. Does Marketo become the nucleus of another cloud or an atom?

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