B2B Marketing Automation Time to Value Guide

As a B2B marketer at a large company, you face a unique challenge. When your business grows, your marketing efforts need to grow with you. They need to scale — across all your regions and brands. Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation solution, can help. But you might be curious about the time to value. How can you minimize the time between implementation and actually seeing results?

In this guide, we cover what proves the return on marketing investment, how you can achieve it fast, and why B2B Marketing Automation helps you see time to value.

Your company’s marketing ROI underscores the effectiveness of its investment in a marketing solution. So whenever your business invests in a new marketing platform, you need a way to measure the outcome.

The marketing return on investment (or MROI for short) is a catchall measurement of your marketing efforts. Your MROI data reveals how each of your marketing channels and campaigns performed, so you can make adjustments accordingly. Already identified your most effective and profitable channels? Focus your marketing spend on those to reach more customers.

But what about a marketing automation solution? How do you measure the MROI for automation? Our basics of marketing ROI guide offers a great primer, which can be summarized into these two takeaways:

• Realize the extraordinary business value of marketing automation. A properly implemented and adopted marketing automation system gives your company a widespread efficiency boost across all of your internal operations — especially the ones involving sales, marketing, and service.
• Businesses that have adopted marketing automation commonly report a quicker time to revenue, better insights into marketing performance, and better alignment of internal teams.

In other words, once your marketing automation system is up and running, expect great things.

• Increased revenue
• More high-quality sales leads
• Less time spent on marketing busywork
• More marketing dollars saved

1. Set clear goals.
2. Identify costs.
3. Get the right technology, including marketing automation.
4. Create a formula for calculating MROI.

The basic formula is MROI = (Marketing Value - Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost.

You can also get a quick estimate of your MROI using this ROI calculator .

Keep in mind that MROI doesn’t always have to be financial in nature. Beyond the financial value of your marketing activities, you can include soft metrics into your marketing KPIs like webinar registrations, delivered mailers, social media and email engagement, and so on.

Ultimately, calculating MROI is about determining the best way to consistently deliver the best engagement to your customers. Hard numbers will give you clear insights into the messaging and channels that resonate the most with your customers. Then you can use that data to personalize their journeys and cultivate long-term customer relationships.

Now that we know the basics behind MROI and how to calculate it, how can B2B marketers reach their desired MROI in a timely manner? The answer lies in quality lead generation. Digital technology has put scores of potential leads easily within the grasp of most businesses. But when it comes to marketing success, lead generation is about quality over quantity. A smaller database stocked with qualified leads is worth far more than an enormous stockpile of dead-end prospects.

That’s one reason why so many businesses are turning to account-based marketing (ABM) to grow their business — and reach their MROI — faster. It’s a strategy that joins data management with marketing automation to create personal campaigns for the B2B customers you most want to reach.

In ABM, sales, marketing, and service teams join forces to identify the key accounts that matter most to their business — the ones with the highest revenue potential and strongest buying signals. These groups work together to share data and insights before and after the deal is closed so that anyone on the team can deliver personalized, connected engagements to every buyer on the account.

Usually, the number of accounts you’re marketing to in ABM is relatively small. However, this is by design. Its account-centric approach saves you time and resources by acquiring high-value customers faster and growing existing customer relationships more strategically through upsell and cross-sell opportunities and elevated service.

ABM is an effective strategy that helps B2B marketers support more complex organizations, but it can’t be done well without the right technology. Rapid adoption of a quality marketing automation tool is a proven way to boost your MROI fast. Marketing automation works to improve the quality of your leads in two key ways:

1. Lead scoring and grading separates quality top-of-funnel leads from the pack, so you can focus resources where they matter most.
2. Lead nurturing campaigns tighten your funnel, ensuring that quality leads don’t slip through the cracks.

Passing quality leads to your sales team not only improves their chances of closing a deal, it saves them from wasting time chasing unqualified prospects who aren’t ready to buy.

Of course, you have to find leads before you can qualify them and pass them to your sales team. That’s where it helps to have some good lead generation tactics at the ready. According to the Salesforce State of Marketing report, the three channels with the highest lead generation ROI are:

• Influencers
• Social publishing/advertising
• Websites

Learn more about how to use these channels and how they can support your lead gen efforts within each stage of the marketing funnel in our How to Grow Your Business with Lead Generation guide.

But today’s customers aren’t just looking for great products and services at fair prices. They want to trust your brand and feel good about what they’re buying. Earning a new customer’s trust means building a relationship with them over time. Ultimately, lead generation is about using the right channels to find high-quality leads you can turn into relationships.

From there, a process called lead nurturing helps your leads get to know you, and vice versa. Lead nurturing can take many forms depending on the customer and products or services at hand. However, it’s always driven by a desire to share relevant content and information with your leads based on their preferences, interests, and interactions with your brand.

As mentioned above, automated lead nurturing tightens up your sales funnel by delivering the right content to the right lead based on their behavior pattern. Content campaigns can be triggered by customer actions like website visits, email opens, or form completions. Campaigns can also be scheduled at preset time intervals. Marketing automation makes it easy to try different tactics, compare results, and create custom campaigns and journeys for different customer personas and product offerings.

One last piece of the puzzle when it comes to achieving MROI fast is alignment. In our discussion around ABM, we talked about the need for internal teams to come together around a cohesive strategy for account selection and targeting. But this benefit extends to any B2B marketing campaign. An automation system can do wonders when it comes to getting your sales, service, and marketing teams on the same page. We call this the unified platform value proposition.

Traditionally, sales, service, and marketing have worked in separate silos within organizations. Self-sufficiency is good, but siloed information is not. When the different parts of your company are sharing information, accessing the same customer records, and generally communicating with one another, awesome customer experiences become much easier to create.

Marketing automation can help facilitate cross-team sharing of key business data, especially when your automation system is part of a unified business platform. Take B2B Marketing Automation , for example. It’s built to handle everything we’ve discussed so far and more. But it’s also built to seamlessly integrate with your sales team’s, service team’s, and entire company’s tech stack.

From automated routing of marketing leads to sales to putting complete customer histories at your service team’s fingertips, B2B Marketing Automation weaves marketing automation into the everyday fabric of your organization. Instead of siloed, limited views of each customer’s marketing engagement, sales history, and service tickets, you get a complete 360-degree view of every customer.

Here are four B2B Marketing Automation features that are especially effective in helping B2B marketers serving larger organizations — or mid-size organizations that are thinking of scaling — shorten their time to value.

1. B2B Marketing Automation Business Units
   For businesses with multiple segments, brands, or geographies, B2B Marketing Automation Business Units helps you more easily manage business content such as legal disclaimers, copyright information, and branding standards across numerous business units — and still maintain a global view.
2. B2B Marketing Analytics Plus
   Anticipate the level of account engagement on your next campaign before it launches. B2B Marketing Analytics Plus uses artificial intelligence to evaluate past performance and gather predictive data to guide your next steps. These data connectors allow marketing, sales, and service teams to quickly integrate data from various external sources and know their audience on a more granular level.
3. Developer Sandboxes for B2B Marketing Automation
   Developer Sandboxes make testing, auditing, and configuring B2B Marketing Automation easier than ever. Admins and developers can use sandboxes to safely test B2B Marketing Automation in an isolated training environment before going to live production. This provides the staging ground they need to ensure all IT governance needs are met before an asset launches.
4. Premier Plus
   Maximize the value of the B2B Marketing Automation solution with access to a team of certified Salesforce experts who provide guidance, support, and training post-implementation — all at your fingertips. This frees your team from day-to-day administrative tasks, such as setting up users or creating reports, and boosts their productivity on more strategic projects. Premier Plus could be particularly helpful for teams that are spread out across geographies and brands — in today’s work-from-anywhere world, that’s almost everyone.

While the benefits of marketing automation are clear, choosing the right system for your midsize to large business can be a daunting task. You move fast and need tools that can easily integrate into your existing martech stack. But it’s also important to adopt a solution that can help you quickly adapt to buyers’ changing expectations and provide a seamless experience across the channels they use most.

When data informs your marketing decisions, you can serve more relevant content to your customers and yield greater returns for your business. Data also unites internal teams around a single source of truth for customer information, allowing members across marketing, sales, and service to provide consistent, connected experiences to your buyers, no matter who they interact with. So when vetting potential marketing automation solutions, start with this question: Does it offer data-driven insights?

B2B Marketing Automation helps marketers align with sales and service and understand which marketing efforts drive revenue. Reporting and analytics give you insights to show what’s moving the needle and which campaigns need a refresh.

Phil Sobczak is Director of Marketing Strategy and Operations at Valpak, a direct marketing company specializing in print, mobile, online, and coupon advertising. Valpak helps local businesses like restaurants and nail salons reach customers directly by delivering coupons through the mail or a digital channel. Each month, Valpak’s famous Blue Envelope is delivered to more than 38 million homes around the country. Phil confirmed B2B Marketing Automation´s ability to provide greater visibility into Valpak’s campaign engagement and performance.

“I’m able to see how my campaigns are performing in near real time, and more importantly, my executives have access to those dashboards too,” he said. “I used to get questions about how a campaign was performing, and I would follow up with an answer a few days later. Now they have direct access to that data, and it’s customized to show the information they want to see.”

Valpak’s marketing department also uses B2B Marketing Automation to communicate with its sales team, sending weekly email updates on campaign progress and results. These provide key insights that help reps target the most promising accounts.

B2B Marketing Automation gives marketing teams the tools they need to stay agile and pivot on a dime.

AI-powered lead scoring and behavior scoring help you pinpoint top leads to nurture into lifelong customer relationships.

Workflow automation streamlines business processes, saving you time while making sure nothing slips through the cracks. For example, Email Template Builder makes it easy for all of your teams to create rich, engaging emails using the same streamlined process.

Connected campaigns bring sales, marketing, and service data together for better, more succinct ROI reporting.

Seamless integrations let you connect B2B Marketing Automation with other key business tools and helps you:

• Integrate with your CRM to support sales and marketing collaboration
• Integrate with video platforms like Zoom to harness data from virtual events
• Gain visibility into advertising spend with Google Ads integration

Companies run better when sales and marketing work together. It’s true for people, and it’s true for the tools they use. Making it easy for the different parts of your company to share information and insights is good for business. That’s what Salesforce Customer 360 was built to do.

Brett Hannath, CMO at McAfee, explains how Salesforce Customer 360 helps his sales, marketing, and service organizations operate as a unified team, demonstrating marketing's value to the business and providing excellent experiences for their customers.

Within Salesforce Customer 360, using Sales Cloud and B2B Marketing Automation together packs a powerful one-two punch. Just ask Valpak — its ABM strategy relies on a seamless integration between Sales Cloud and B2B Marketing Automation to provide a high-level overview of how an account is progressing through the lifecycle, and then deliver relevant content based on those insights.

“With Sales Cloud and B2B Marketing Automation working together, we can see all the data points associated with an account and pinpoint exactly where they are in the sales journey,” Phil said. “Then, our marketing team lets sales reps know exactly when to target the buyers and the best content for engaging them.”

Talk to any B2B marketer about the pain points of their jobs, and you’ll likely hear a common refrain: the difficulty of proving the success of a campaign. Determining the return on investment of a marketing campaign is often a challenge for marketing teams — leaving them scratching their heads and struggling to quantify their success.

At Wärtsilä, they knew this struggle all too well.

Wärtsilä is a global leader in smart technologies and complete lifecycle solutions for the marine and energy markets. Based in Finland, Wärtsilä manufactures and services large engines and other essential equipment for vessels and power plants worldwide. With clients all over the globe investing in Wärtsilä’s services, sales cycles can last years.

Wärtsilä’s leaders found themselves with massive amounts of data compiled in multiple systems. The lack of unity in the data made it difficult for the team to see the full picture of their campaign efforts and draw insights from the results. Furthermore, the marketing team had trouble attributing sales success to the campaigns they were implementing.

Knowing they needed a way to connect the dots in their data to measure success and uncover better insights, Wärtsilä’s leaders tapped into Salesforce’s integrated service platform and began using Einstein Attribution to obtain AI-powered insights from their marketing campaigns.

Wärtsilä’s data was stored in multiple systems, which proved to be a huge roadblock for their team when trying to draw actionable insights from the results of marketing campaigns. The first step toward successful attribution measurement required integration of their marketing, sales, and service efforts.

Salesforce offered a single platform for all of Wärtsilä’s data. With B2B Marketing Automation, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud working together to compile data into one source, the account teams were easily able to connect data from prospects, accounts, and more with Salesforce’s user-friendly interface.

“Our campaign attribution was much more difficult before Einstein Attribution came into the picture. We used a homegrown model, working with massive datasets across multiple systems,” said Jaime López, General Manager for Marketing Operations at Wärtsilä. “Salesforce not only allowed us to dig deeper into our data, but made the user experience seamless and easy to use.”

Now that Wärtsilä’s teams were able to see all of their data in one integrated platform, they could begin to understand the impact of their campaigns, use those insights to boost sales, and prove the value of their marketing efforts.

Salesforce’s integrated system gave Wärtsilä the strong foundation it needed to start making sense of its data. With the assistance of AI-powered insights from Einstein Attribution, including the new Data-Driven Model, Wärtsilä could better understand the effects of its marketing campaigns and draw actionable and profitable insights.

B2B Marketing Automation enables Wärtsilä to dive into micro-level insights to uncover detailed findings about its marketing performance. This magnification of detail gives the team the information they need to have more meaningful conversations and spark new ideas.

“Leveraging B2B Marketing Automation, we now have a much more complete view of ROI and can dive deeper on conversations at a micro level. This helps us massively in trimming the sails and adjusting our marketing,” said López.

Using Einstein Attribution, Wärtsilä was able to attribute seven times more revenue to various marketing campaigns when compared to the traditional models it had used in the past. The marketing team was also able to credit eight times more leads in Wärtsilä’s pipeline to their campaigns.

And the value of using Salesforce extends beyond marketing campaigns. Using Service Cloud, Wärtsilä’s customer support team has been able to resolve cases more efficiently. They’re also able to quantify the impact of their customer service operations — even supporting an additional $150,000 in sales.

B2B Marketing Automation´s user-friendly, easy-to-use platform meant Wärtsilä was able to quickly train 150-plus users in over 30 companies. With more team members accessing the company’s data, they can approach their marketing, sales, and service as a unified front. As a result, Wärtsilä is capitalizing on its marketing campaigns to boost sales and accurately measure success.