Last week, we shared 7 signs that could mean your marketing technology vendor isn’t 
measuring up. If you’re facing any of those challenges you may have decided it’s time to roll up your sleeves and change marketing resource management technology vendors. Here are some guidelines to help ensure a successful transition.
1. Research alternatives. You don’t want to end up in the scenario of deploying only some features of the technology solution you’ve purchased. With marketing departments stretched more thinly than ever before, it’s important that your marketing technology vendor has the resources to help coordinate the details of your rollout, from training and support to uploading marketing assets, templates and leads lists into the new system. A full service marketing service provider can oversee the technology transition to ensure you deploy, and use, all of the features available to you. Some criteria to consider as you are evaluating vendors include:
• Training timeline and costs (complementary, incremental or specialized)
• Licensing costs
• Certification costs if required
• Support options (website, tier 0/self help, tutorials, email, phone and chat)
• Support response time (how quickly you can expect a support response)
• Whether the new vendor has a dedicated account manager
2. Work with your new vendor on a detailed transition plan. Your transition plan should account for the time and resources required to export any files from your existing marketing technology system for handoff to your new vendor during the technology configuration, including:
• Marketing materials/assets
• Campaign materials
• Lists
• Budgets
• User profiles (e.g. administrator versus user)
3. Notify and engage stakeholders. Prepare department leaders for the transition by sharing the reasons you are changing marketing technology vendors and the benefits of changing. Representatives from IT, Marketing and Sales and distributed sales channels such as Distributors, Agents and Partners should all be consulted during the change to encourage adoption of the new tool. A successful marketing technology transition is measured by successful user interactions with the toolset – meaning that, if your users aren’t comfortable using your technology solution, then it’s unlikely you’ll achieve the full benefits. To encourage user engagement, share success stories and best practices internally and consider running contests with prizes offered to the users who are most engaged with the technology solution.
Conclusion
To ensure a successful marketing technology transition, seek out vendors with dedicated account managers who can help coordinate the details of your rollout – including uploading marketing materials, assets and customer lists to the new system – and encourage user engagement by running contests and sharing success stories and best practices internally. Finally, full service marketing service providers can provide the people and process know-how to help you achieve the full benefits of your marketing technology solution.
How agile is your marketing department? Marketing technology solutions enabling sales and customer-facing networks to personalize marketing messages are a pivotal enabler of marketing agility and competitive advantage. Stay turned for a future blog reviewing guidelines for personalizing marketing communications.
