People are spending increasing amounts of time in digital channels and making purchasing decisions online. During recent years marketing has been under increasing pressure to adapt to this changing customer behavior. The megatrend of digitalization poses new possibilities and threats to all business units, but especially marketing and sales need to find new ways to interact with customers in digital channels. New products are continuously introduced in the marketing technology field, and companies are facing tough decisions on how and what technologies they should invest in to enhance their customer experience and operational effectiveness of marketing and sales. One of the most talked concepts in marketing at the moment, especially in B2B domain, is marketing automation. At the same time, almost every company claims to aim for a customer-centric organization and service experience. Becoming customer-centric requires seamless alignment of marketing and sales, and the early evidence from the field of marketing automation suggests that marketing automation can act as an integrator between marketing and sales to enable that alignment.
The purpose of this research is to identify, analyze and categorize what kind of problems Finnish companies encounter when aligning their B2B marketing-sales interface with a marketing automation system. In addition, this research aims to clarify what does a successful marketing automation adaption require in the marketing-sales interface. The theoretical framework of the research is formed from the scattered research field of marketing-sales alignment. Mostly unresearched field of marketing automation and the field of technology as an integrator of marketing and sales are also present in the theory section for better understanding of the context.
The research was conducted as an inductive qualitative case research with open and semi-structured interviews. A grounded theory approach was applied for data generation and analysis, where these two phases complemented each other in parallel. Six marketing consultants and six in-house organization experts were interviewed for this research.
The key dimensions where Finnish companies seem to face troubles when aligning their sales and marketing with a marketing automation system can be broadly categorized under vision, culture, structure, process and people. Under these dimensions the success themes that emerged from the interview data, by the means of grounded theory, were top-management team, development prioritization, expectations management, data-driven culture, marcomms and sales structure, integrators, metrics, content production and distribution, roles and language, sales activities, customer knowledge generation, knowledge dissemination, incentives and rewards, and training and hiring of people. These themes are the ones that a company planning on investing in a marketing automation platform should revise.
The findings of this research indicate that companies aligning their sales-marketing interface with marketing automation system face several aspects that need to be addressed, or the return on investment of a marketing automation system may turn out poor. The findings also support that a marketing automation project should be treated as a business development project, not merely a technology project
