Glossary
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is software that runs campaigns to groups of people on its own: sending sequences, reacting to behaviour, scoring engagement, and moving contacts between segments without anyone doing it by hand.
Segments, not individuals
The dividing line with sales automation is who the software is thinking about. Marketing automation acts on a segment: everyone who downloaded the guide, everyone in this industry who has not opened anything in ninety days. Sales automation acts on one record because one seller is working it.
That is why the two tools feel so different to use. A marketing tool asks you to define an audience. A CRM asks you to open a record.
Drip campaigns and nurture
A drip is a fixed sequence on a timer. A nurture programme reacts: what it sends next depends on what the person did with the last one. Nurture is better and considerably more work to maintain, and a badly maintained nurture programme is worse than a simple drip because it goes wrong invisibly.
The honest test for either is whether the content would be worth reading by someone with no intention of buying. If not, the automation is just distributing something nobody wanted more efficiently.
When a B2B services firm actually needs it
Later than the vendors suggest. A firm selling six-figure engagements to a few hundred target companies does not have a segment problem, and a nurture programme sent to two hundred people is an expensive newsletter.
What that firm usually needs is the newsletter, sent consistently, plus a CRM that says who has gone quiet. Marketing automation earns its price when the volume of leads exceeds what people can read, which for most professional services firms is never.
How marketing automation works in a CRM
- One contact record, two systems writing to it. If the marketing tool and the CRM each keep their own version of the person, the two will disagree within a month.
- Engagement visible to sales. A rep should see what marketing sent and what the contact did with it, on the record, before they call.
- A defined handover. A score, a stage, or a form fill that moves someone from campaigns to a named owner. Undefined handovers are where leads are lost between the two teams.
- Suppression that works both ways. Open deals and current clients should not receive the acquisition sequence. This is the single most common embarrassment in the category.
How we do it in Lumenbase
Lumenbase does not try to be a marketing automation platform. It holds the contact and the engagement, and connects to the tools that send at segment scale, so the CRM stays the record of the relationship rather than a second half-populated copy of it.