Best Practice Report

Marketing Automation Platform Adoption: A Crawl, Walk, And Run Approach

January 1st, 2018
Laura Cross, VP, Principal Analyst
Laura Cross VP, Principal Analyst

Summary

Marketers need to prove the impact that their marketing automation platform (MAP) has on the organization — in terms of marketing contribution to revenue and ROI. The number of compelling features provided by a MAP requires organizations to refine their adoption strategy into phases to help with focus and milestone achievement. MAP adoption can be divided into three phases — crawl, walk and run — to make the process more manageable.

When adopting a new marketing automation platform (MAP), B2B marketers often struggle to progress from one stage of capability to the next. Some get frustrated if they fail to make rapid progress in their MAP usage. Others focus on their initial and primary use cases and ignore more advanced possibilities (see “Marketing Automation Platforms Defined”). In this report, for each of 13 core MAP functionalities we define three stages of implementation — crawl, walk and run — to help organizations effectively adopt a MAP and reach their demand creation performance goals.

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