Sharon Drew Morgan makes very interesting points in her article where she draws attention on how marketing automation software needs to add decision facilitation technology to their offerings.
She writes, any such marketing software like Marketo, Eloqua, just help capture some names - email addresses, telephone nos etc. which is great but there is no way to understand at what stage is the prospect in the buying process. This is the precisely where such software must add value to any company's lead management process.
I agree with her, as "stage of buying/decision process" decides in the lead's mind, the kind of information they need & plays a huge role in evaluation & purchase decision. According to me, each person, who is a lead, could be in different stages in the buying/decision process:
- Trigger stage - where the person is just evaluating the need
- Consider stage - where the person is considering to buy or not
- Search stage - where the person is actively looking at all choices before making the decision
- Choose stage - where the person is close to making the decision & is in a compare mind-set
- Buy Stage - Where the person looking at all offers/discounts and ready to pay the cheque
Marketing automation software need to "integrate" or "tag" this decision-based thinking that goes through a prospect's mind to ensure a precise method of tagging the lead. This will certainly have downstream effects on what information is shared at each stage with the prospect by both the sales and the marketing team that can accelerate decision making or conversion.
Capturing the name alone is not good enough. Calling it Hot/Cold/Warm may be better but not good enough too. It is important for marketing automation softwares to "tag" the leads by the the stage in the decision cycle to truly value-add to the marketing automation process.