Tips Why your data-driven marketing efforts always crash and burn.

A few weeks ago we signed on the dotted line for a new tool to help with some internal initiatives.

Full of anticipation, we emailed our new account rep. No response. We tried again. Again, nothing. Finally, we heard back from someone who routed us to another someone who said so-and-so could help us get started and answer all our questions.

That person ended up being a barely-trained agent who mindlessly tabbed through a PowerPoint deck about the company’s FAQ documents.

Nothing New

If you’ve ever purchased enterprise software, you’ve almost certainly had a similar experience. You pay some company a big chunk of money to solve a really important problem and they do nothing more than hand over the keys and wish you luck.

It’s why more than half of all CRM and marketing automation initiatives fail. It’s why Forrester has said time and time again:

CRM Success Requires Focus On People, Not Only Technology

From day one, that’s been our focus with Inntopia Marketing Cloud.

More than 14 years and hundreds of clients later, the resorts and hotels that work with us understand better than anyone how true that is. They’ve seen first hand that without this bunch of happy, talented, proactive people behind the scenes, it’d be yet another failure to launch.

That’s a tough lesson to swallow for people like me who believe they can do it all themselves, but it’s true for three reasons.

Time

Every resort or hotel is different. Which means that any platform you choose is going to take some time to get it working the way you need it to. Chances are, that’s time you don’t have. On our end, however, that time is built right into our model.

Expertise

And once you get up and running, a strategy built on best practices is required to make the most of your investment. You may not know how to warm up an IP address or the perfect timing for automated campaigns or what emerging industry trends matter, but we do. And we bring those to every status call and meeting.

Help When You Need It

Most important, however, are those situations when you need help. Those moments rarely happen on quiet Tuesday mornings. Rather, they happen in crunch time. When revenue is on the line. In those moments you don’t need an FAQ, you need a friend..You need someone you can call and you need that someone to answer.

The Best in the Business

So being, we are incredibly picky when we hire our account managers.

• They’re not fresh college grads, they’ve been in your shoes.
• They’re not button pushers, they’re some of hospitality’s best strategic thinkers.
• They don’t wait for you to call, they proactively pick up the phone
• And when you do call them, they actually answer. (Seriously.)
• They don’t just hand you the keys, they roll up their sleeves and help you execute.

And then we give those account managers the time, the resources, and tools to help you every step of the way. We’re not an observer, we’re a co-pilot.

You Need Both

You’ve got to have great technology – and we absolutely do – but the real reason your data-driven marketing efforts have failed in the past wasn’t because the technology was lacking, necessarily, it was because the human side was lacking.

You’re already busy but you need to up your data-driven marketing game. To do that you’ll need great technology, yes, but you’re gonna need even better people behind the scenes.

We’ve got both.