How the buying process for a Marketing Automation tool looks like
Usually, the process is led by Account Executives (AE) on the tool provider side. This is not because they want to manipulate you, but because most of the clients are new to the process. Nevertheless, it is not bad to know what the process looks like so you can lead the process as well and be sure to tailor it to your company's needs.
Here are the standard steps:
You or the Team Lead contacts the tool provider that you are interested in. In this inquiry, it’s always good to include some basic info that will help AEs to come prepared for your first meeting. This is info like subscribers count, content you want to use (like email, SMS, push notifications…), whether you are already using some MA tools or not…
AE and you/ your Team Lead arrange an Introduction meeting.
At the Introduction meeting, the tool provider team (AE) will try to gather basic info about your needs so they can later on tell it to their Solution Engineer who will tailor the demo for you.
The next meeting is the Technical Discovery meeting. In this meeting, you will meet the Solution Engineer from the tool provider team. This person will ask you a lot of technical and business questions that will help him/her build the tool demo for you. This is the moment where having an internal team for this project is important! All your team members will know to answer their field questions and we lower the chances of omitting something important. If you are going through it by yourself, then make sure you get to know what you want to do with an MA tool and cover the topics described in this article.
Tool Demo - The tool provider team will show you a personalized demo that will include 2-3 (sometimes more) Use Cases that will address some of your regular and most important business situations. Most of the time this is an Opt-in journey, Promotional campaigns Journey, and Abandoned Cart campaign. Sometimes, it is important to have a decision maker in this call, but if this is not possible, the Team Lead must take over this role in the call.
Pricing meeting - after the demo call, this is the most important call during the process - where you find out pricing for the tool.
After you know pricing, you usually take things internally and have internal discussions.
Discussion call - after you discuss pricing and tool capabilities internally, you go back to the tool provider. Here are a couple of scenarios. You can either negotiate the price, close the deal, abandon the deal, or ask for more information and technical documentation.
The most important advice I would give here is to be completely honest with the Sales team of the tool regarding your requirements. Tell them exactly what you want out of the tool and what is an overkill for you. Also, tell them what are your deadlines and who are decision makers. This info will make sure they can adapt to your needs because, after all, you are the client and the most important thing is that they demo the tool exactly how you need it. Other than that, it will just be a waste of time for you.
What to look after
There are a couple of things it is good to be aware of so you don’t miss something that is a deal-breaker for you or is maybe a deal-winner!
This might be the contract length. Some tool providers like to sign 2-year contracts right away and they guarantee better prices than for 1-year contracts. I had clients for whom every contract over 1-year was a deal-breaker. They wanted to first do a 1-year contract and if they decide to stick to the tool after that, then they will think about a 2-year contract. On the other side, I had a lot of clients who preferred 2-year contracts because of the better prices they would get. So make sure you know your stand on this topic.
Furthermore, most of the tools provide you with a price for basic functionality, and then on top of that they have add-ons that are different depending on the client. Make sure you know exactly which add-ons you need right away and which ones are nice to have in the future. Add-ons can be sending of SMS, Google/Meta Ads connectors, AI technology…
Service Level Agreement (SLA) is, if you ask me, one of the most important things to look after! If you are a team of one person then even more so! SLA stands for after-sale support. So let’s say you start using the tool and you have an issue, you want to have a delegated time in your contract that somebody from the tool team can help you with and you don’t need to pay additionally for it. Closely related to this topic is a general tool‘s Support Team availability and quality. It means that you need to investigate online how good the Support is for that particular tool and how comprehensive their online Knowledge Base is. Do they have detailed guides for Email Sends, How-To Articles on many topics, Video Tutorials showing steps inside the tool, and so on?
Conclusion
I hope that after reading this article, you have a clear idea of what this process looks like and you feel more confident in going through it!
If you have any questions on the topic that arose while reading the article, please don’t hesitate to write them to me and I will do my best to answer you as soon as I can!
Good luck automating!
