• how it works
• how to use it
• using it effectively

Marketing automation has been a hot topic for companies in all industries.  As more an more marketing efforts move online through your company’s website, natural search, paid search and social media, your prospects and customers are more knowledgeable about your products than ever.  As a result, most prospects interact with your company before actively “raising their hands” for information — without assistance of involvement from your sales and marketing teams.  You need to deliver timely content across multiple channels: online, in-person, at industry events and everywhere else.  Marketing automation steps in to help you to track the effectiveness of all of your interactions with your prospects and customers, online and off.

We’re hosting a 3-part webinar series with our partner, Eloqua, marketing automation pioneer, and Barbara Anguis Saxby, Founder and Managing Director at Accelent Consulting – a strategic marketing firm that has worked with companies like Peoplesoft and Salesforce.com.

This 3-part series covers the basics of marketing automation, practical applications for marketing automation and how marketing teams can measure success.

The first session answers the most critical question:

What is Marketing Automation?

We’ll talk about:

• Measuring results across the entire customer lifecycle
• Building a better marketing funnel
• Improving trust between sales and marketing

If you are interested in registering for the first session on May 18, register here.

• Webinar Session: What’s Marketing Automation
• Date: May 18, 2010
• Time: 10A PST

Are you interested in more content like this?  Join our marketing automation email list.

What are contact roles?

Contact roles allow users to tie people, and their roles in the process, to each opportunity.

Opportunity Contact Role Example

Using opportunity contact roles is the only way to pull in campaign information to help you understand which campaigns impacted each opportunity.  And of course it helps the sales team understand the people involved in every closed deal.

So if you need to prod your team into using the contact roles, download our free app on the Appexchange to require contact roles for opportunities, based on the opportunity stage. This app is customizable, and can match your own opportunity stages.

Find it here.