Key objections people give when buying marketing automation are:

• Not enough budget/pricing
  • Answer: Don’t look at marketing automation as an expense, look at it as an investment. If you’re in marketing, marketing automation is a must have. There’s no better way to prove the impact your marketing has on your business by buying marketing automation and showing results to your management team. Build a ROI for your investment if necessary. Make sure to account for time saved from efficiency gains and talk to your sales team about the benefits. Shorter sales cycles and bigger purchases are two fringe benefits of using this strategy. Also consider the cost of your competitors using marketing automation to leap frog you in the market. How does loss of mind share and market share impact your business? Marketing automation pays for itself.
• No time – perception that it would be a huge undertaking to learn system, switch things over.
  • Answer: Input equals output, there’s no doubt about that. Marketing automation by itself is a big timesaver. Instead of doing individual marketing tasks discreetly by themselves, marketers will have a platform to work with. It’s a single system to learn to achieve individual tasks – lowering the learning curve, saving time and ultimately money. There’s also an immediate gain by using marketing automation. Within seconds from installing tracking code on your website, marketers will see businesses and people visiting their website. They’ll also begin capturing visitor and prospect data from social media and overall engagement across the site. After adding the tracking code, most companies will start by sending an email campaign. These two tasks can be done within an hour. It’s not a big undertaking. Email campaigns easily transfer over to your new marketing system.
• Too busy to take it on at the moment
  • Answer: Dragging your feet on marketing automation means avoiding the inevitable. Marketing automation is like CRM in the 21st century. If a business is not using a CRM it’s a real head-scratcher. Same thing applies for marketing automation. Marketing automation is not a nice-to-have; rather, a must-have in this digital era. If you have any competition whatsoever, there’s a high probability that your competitor is using a marketing automation strategy. Additionally, ask yourself if you’re too busy because you’re doing multiple tasks that are manually intensive or your company is short-staffed. These are two great reasons to add a marketing automation strategy to your mix. Marketing automation automates a number of tasks and acts as your marketing assistant – saving you precious time to focus on more value-added efforts for your organization.
• We’re too small and don’t need a marketing automation strategy
  • Answer: This blog post on objections to marketing automation, we’re too small! should help.
• Don’t have the people in place to really use and get money’s worth
  • Answer: As noted above, installing marketing automation can be done in seconds. From there, companies chip away at their strategy, adding small bits of capability to help them do their job faster and easier. Rome wasn’t built overnight – and a good marketing automation strategy isn’t either! Heck, we’re still innovating and using our own software in different ways, but the neat thing is that once you have your process in place, it really is that “set it and forget it” concept. You’d probably also love to add another marketing person to your staff, wouldn’t you? Rather than making that big investment in human capital, consider using technology to assist. The investment in marketing automation relative to human capital is much lower! There are small wins that deliver big gains. Implementing these small wins, such as tracking, persona building, etc. will help you get your money’s worth right from the start. Make sure to take the time to ask yourself why not, instead of why. Look over the benefits of marketing automation and think about the risk of not doing something.
• We have that already covered – believe they can accomplish on their own
  • Answer: For leading marketing automation companies it’s taken them 10s of engineering years to create such platforms. There’s a very good chance you’re not covering all your basis. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’ve done it all. Take the time to let down your guard and explore how marketing automation could help you. You might be able to do some of the things, but how well can you do them? How efficient are you with them? Write down what you think you’re doing today and share that with your Account Manager. Jot down your pain points and problems with marketing, relationship with your sales team, struggles getting budget dollars from your management team. It’s true, marketers that aren’t very technical typically don’t understand marketing automation. Let your marketing automation provider help you with that!
• Enamored with a name brand/bigger company
  • Answer: Are you drinking the Kool-Aid? Make sure to ask your marketing automation partner what their onboarding process and support is. Take the time to really dig into how they integrate with your CRM and how their automation works. Remember that large, public companies care primarily about satisfying Wall Street; whereas smaller companies care about satisfying their clients. Are you going to be “just another number” to the marketing automation company? When you think about them, do you see them as a vendor or a partner?