New Checklist Guides B2B Marketing Automation Platform Purchases

Author: Richard Adhikari / Source: E-Commerce Times

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Four Quadrant this week released its Marketing Automation Buyer’s Checklist for companies seeking to purchase a B2B marketing automation platform, or MAP.

The checklist has eight major categories for evaluation and more than 35 subcategories. It lists more than 100 questions buyers should ask to make an informed assessment of MAP vendors’ offerings.

The checklist covers expected business outcomes from MAPs, who and what the MAP should support, the integration capabilities the MAP should have, and what APIs the MAP should offer out of the box.

The checklist also covers the following must-have MAP capabilities:

• Demand generation and account-based marketing
• Personalization
• SEO/SEM
• E-commerce
• Email
• Social media
• UI/UX
• Reporting
• Analytics

The MAP checklist lets businesses establish a predictable model that documents the following:

• Each stage of the parking and sales funnel
• Lead sources
• Quantities and values at each state
• Movement between stages
• Velocity of movement between stages
• Contribution of marketing at each stage in the sales cycle

Companies of any size can use the checklist, because they “all have the same problem,” said Peter Buscemi, founder of Four Quadrant.

“The only difference is scale,” he told CRM Buyer. “There is at least one person in any organization performing some or all of these tasks, but usually not efficiently, effectively or in a scalable manner.”

Breaking It Down

The section on who and what the MAP supports has more than 20 questions to ensure…

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