What’s in the word “development” that many businesses tend to associate with success?

Development in a more specific sense also means an act of adding and subtracting. For instance, real estate development involves the clearing up of a patch of land to make room for townhouses along with such important features as sewage systems and recreation areas. The process involved in this example of development can also be applied to B2B marketing, which is experiencing unprecedented developments all on its own.

Recently, managers want to streamline their lead nurturing activities, optimize their CRM infrastructure and ultimately free themselves from the stress typically associated with a nauseating amount of data. It is in this sense that marketers want to develop their lead management processes by adding new features to it that can effectively subtract stress through marketing automation, hence improving quality customer relations.

But with regards to the arduous task of setting up a marketing automation system, businesses need to develop a practical mindset owing to several issues. In the same way that real estate developers face construction and environmental issues, marketers must properly implement automation systems to achieve better productivity and profitability in the face of ever volatile buyer behaviors.

For this, it is imperative to know these essential ways by LeadMD’s Justin Gray for optimizing marketing automation systems:

Determine your process.

Process always comes before technology, so first determine a process for segmenting your buyers, and apply it to your marketing-automation system. Define the stereotypes of your best buyers. After determining their pain points and what they need to build trust, ask yourself how you’ll identify segments in real time based on demographics, firmographics and behaviors.

Related: Humanizing Marketing Automation: A Three Step Plan

Capture data.

Prioritize capturing data about behavior over sending email and other short-term goals. You need to ask intelligent questions on intake forms, have your sales team enter critical data and use data scrubbing or append tactics to learn as much as you can about your buyers.

Related: 10 Marketing Automation Hacks All Businesses Should Be Using

Establish baseline goals.

The most overlooked element of successful marketing is making baseline projections. But if you don’t know where you’re aiming, how can you expect to hit your target? Some marketers hesitate to establish baseline goals because it may call attention to failure.

Related: How to Define Goals for Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management

Gray cautions us however that automation is not strictly “automatic.” Managers still need to exert extra effort in making sure there programs are set properly. But at least, with marketing automation, they can develop better business experiences for themselves and their clients.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238575