Louise also gathered input from the project team and the marketing community as a whole to determine what the ideal marketing automation platform would look like for Sharp’s team. The vast amount of input she received helped her create a thorough RFP document that listed key features and capabilities her team needed to be successful.
“That RFP we created for vendors to respond to listed all our requirements (which were split out by category) and indicated whether these features were considered essential or nice to have. So, we had questions that were specific to functionality such as, What’s the landing page builder like? What are your email marketing capabilities? We also asked questions regarding the vendor and their software like, What’s your customer support like? How reliable is the platform?
Because we have so many business units and offices using different CRMs, there also turned out to be quite a complex need for our new platform to have a parent-child structure and be able to support multiple integrations.”
Louise and her team first evaluated their incumbent vendors and two new ones, asking each team to submit a written response to their questions, present a platform demo, and provide a quote. However, none of the platforms they evaluated quite matched their needs.
“We scored each of these vendors based on how closely they met the different categories and requirements. At that point, there was only one vendor that could genuinely meet the requirements with a high enough score and competitive pricing, but it wasn’t a platform that anyone on the project team really loved.”
Demonstrating that you should never settle when it comes to choosing the right marketing automation platform, Sharp went back to the drawing board in hopes of finding the perfect solution.
Louise and her team reached out to Act-On and another vendor during their second evaluation round. After conducting the same detailed evaluation process, Louise and her team found that Act-On had many of the features Sharp was looking for — including the “parent/child” Marketing Network structure that would enable the company to centralize its marketing efforts.
“We went through a very thorough evaluation process and I would say that, for a number of different factors, Act-On just ended up being the best fit for our organization. A key thing for us was that the platform we picked had to have an interface that was very easy to use and intuitive.
Unlike other companies that might have a centralized team of specialists who are always in the system, we weren’t going to have a big team of people to manage our marketing automation platform. Therefore, the solution we picked had to be intuitive enough so that a marketing generalist could use it easily without knowing things like how to code HTML.
We also have a very complex organization structure where we need to do certain things on the central level and other things on the local level. So, Act-On’s marketing network feature ended up being a really important factor in our selection process because it allows us to set up an account hierarchy and easily share assets between business units. Equally as important was that this platform had to connect to multiple CRMs, such as Salesforce, used by our various business units, which Act-On did.”