The new digital world empowers business buyers with access to tools and information that help them explore solutions prior to engaging in any sort of formal purchase process. We\’ve all seen research about how buyers progress much further in decision making before talking to sales for the first time. To buck this trend, marketers must find ways to cultivate customer interest and convert prospects into qualified leads. Marketing automation — or, as we like to think of it here at Forrester, lead-to-revenue management (L2RM) — now becomes essential to standardizing, automating, and scaling the practices needed to engage with customers across their life-cycle.
via From Revenue To Life-Cycle Management: 2014 Investment Imperatives For B2B CMOs | Forrester Research.
If we talk about B2B: Can we really talk about automation or is it more a 1:1 communication? Instead of trying to SPAM potential buyers with potentially interesting information, we should consider to start a real dialogue with them. What is your opinion on it?
P.S. I may be wrong with this assumption for B2C. Or not?