Customer Experience Matrix: The Seven Deadly Sins of Marketeing Automation System Selection

I’ll be giving a Webinar this Thursday on evaluating marketing automation software, sponsored by Neolane. Part of the content will be a list of Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing System Selection.  I thought that was worth a blog post of its own. So here goes. 1. Ignoring Users. Selection teams often don’t take the the time to understand how future users of the system do their jobs today. The justification may be that everything will change anyway, or that every marketing department has similar needs, or that the users themselves don’t know what they need. The cost of skipping this step is that you don’t learn about existing business processes and user skills. This means you don’t identify what processes need to be changed and what training your users will need.  The immediate result is you can’t factor those items into your vendor evaluation. Longer term, your deployment will take longer since you’ll have to stop to gather this information before you can proceed.