still be disappointed. The point is not about technology; it’s about internal alignment. If you think of the primary teams or departments in your client’s organization that should be aligned, they are likely to be: • Marketing Team: These are the planners and strategists, the people who think up and design the campaigns against specific business objectives. • Operations Team: or the campaign execution team. These are the people that are actually working with the marketing technologies, or managing the vendors that do the heavy lifting. • Analytics Team: people that manipulate data, find insights, and create reports for the campaigns. HOW NOT TO MAKE MARKETING AUTOMATION WORK FOR YOU • The Marketing Team starts off by submitting a simple ad-hoc campaign request lacking any real targeting criteria, test plan or cross-channel engagement strategy. This may be due to a lack of knowledge about the data that are available, past campaign successes, or the available functionality of the technology platform. • Then, with this simple request in hand, the Operations Team needs to use only the basic functionality of the platform to create an audience, build a simple email template, and launch the campaign. • The simplicity of this ad hoc campaign naturally leads to a lack of data to analyze, with limited insights and basic reports coming in from the Analytics Team. A simple request leads to a simple execution, which leads to limited insights. And that loop continues, leading to limited use of technology – only 20% of what's available.