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Select a Marketing Management Suite

A best-fit solution balances needs, cost, and capability.

  • Time, money, and effort are wasted on channels and campaigns that are not resonating with your customer base.
  • Email marketing, social marketing, and/or lead management alone are often not enough to meet more sophisticated marketing needs.
  • Many organizations struggle with taking a systematic approach to selection that pairs functional requirements with specific marketing workflows, and as a result they choose a marketing management suite (MMS) that is not well aligned to their needs, wasting resources and causing end-user frustration.
  • For IT managers or marketing professionals, the task to incorporate MMS technology into the organization requires not only receiving the buy-in for the MMS investment but also determining the vendor and solution that best fit the organization’s particular marketing management needs.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • An MMS enables complex campaigns across many channels, product lines, customer segments, and marketing groups throughout the enterprise.
  • Selecting an MMS has become increasingly difficult because the number of players in the marketplace has ballooned. Moreover, picking the wrong marketing solution has a direct impact on revenue.
  • Determine whether the investment in an MMS is worthwhile or the funds are better allocated elsewhere. For organizations with a large audience or varied product offerings, an MMS enables complex campaigns across many channels, product lines, customer segments, and marketing groups throughout the enterprise.

Impact and Result

  • Maximize your success and credibility with a proposal that emphasizes the areas relevant to your situation.
  • Perform more effective customer targeting and campaign management. Having an MMS equips marketers with the tools they need to make informed decisions around campaign execution, resulting in better targeting, acquisition, and customer retention. This means more revenue.
  • Maximize marketing impact with analytics-based decision making. Understanding users’/customers’ behaviors and preferences will allow you to run effective marketing initiatives.

Select a Marketing Management Suite Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how to approach selecting an MMS, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Select a Marketing Management Suite – Executive Brief
Select a Marketing Management Suite – Phases 1-3

1. Launch the MMS project and collect requirements

Assess the organization’s fit for MMS technology and structure the MMS selection project.

Select a Marketing Management Suite – Phase 1: Launch the MMS Project and Collect Requirements
MMS Readiness Assessment Checklist

2. Shortlist marketing management suites

Produce a vendor shortlist for your MMS.

Select a Marketing Management Suite – Phase 2: Shortlist Marketing Management Suites

Select a Marketing Management Suite

A best-fit solution balances needs, cost, and capability.

Table of contents

  1. Project Rationale
  2. Execute the Project/DIY Guide
  3. Appendices

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

Navigate the complexity of a vast ecosystem by taking a structured approach to marketing management suite (MMS) selection.

“Marketing applications are in high demand, but it is difficult to select a suite that is right for your organization. Market offerings have grown from 50 vendors to over 800 in the past five years. Much of the process of identifying an appropriate vendor is not about the vendor at all, but rather about having a comprehensive understanding of internal needs. There are instances where a smaller-point solution is necessary to satisfy requirements and a full marketing management suite is an overinvestment.

Likewise, a partner with differentiating features such as AI-driven workflows and a mobile software development kit can act as a powerful extension of an overall customer experience management strategy. It is crucial to make the right decision; missing the mark on an MMS selection will have a direct impact on the business’ bottom line.”

Ben Dickie
Research Director, Enterprise Applications
Info-Tech Research Group

Phase milestones

Launch the MMS Project and Collect Requirements — Phase 1

  • Understand the MMS market space.
  • Assess organizational and project readiness for MMS selection.
  • Structure your MMS selection and implementation project by refining your MMS roadmap.
  • Align organizational use-case fit with market use cases.
  • Collect, prioritize, and document MMS requirements.

Shortlist MMS Tool — Phase 2

  • Review MMS market leaders and players within your aligned use case.
  • Review MMS vendor profiles and capabilities.
  • Shortlist MMS vendors based on organizational fit.

Select an MMS — Phase 3

  • Submit request for proposal (RFP) to shortlisted vendors.
  • Evaluate vendor responses and develop vendor demonstration scripts.
  • Score vendor demonstrations and select the final product.

Stop! Are you ready for this project?

This Research Is Designed For:
  • IT applications directors and business analysts supporting their marketing teams in selecting and implementing a robust marketing solution.
  • Any organization looking to procure an MMS tool that will allow it to automate its marketing processes or learn more about the MMS vendor landscape.
 This Research Will Help You:
  • Understand today’s MMS market, specific to marketing automation, marketing intelligence, and social marketing use-case scenarios.
  • Understand MMS functionality as well as marketing terminology.
  • Follow best practices to prepare for and execute on selection, including requirements gathering and vendor evaluation.
This Research Will Also Assist:
  • Marketing managers, brand managers, and any marketing professional looking to build a cohesive marketing platform.
  • MMS project teams or working groups tasked with managing an RFP process for vendor selection.
 This Research Will Help Them
  • Assess organizational and project readiness for embarking on MMS selection.
  • Draft an RFP, manage the vendor and product review process, and select a vendor.

Executive summary

Situation

The MMS market is a landscape of vendors offering campaign management, multichannel support, analytics, and publishing tools. Many vendors specialize in some of these areas but not all. Sometimes multiple products are necessary – but determining which feature sets the organization truly needs can be a challenging task. The right technology stack is critical in order to bring automation to marketing initiatives.

Complication

  • The first challenge is deciding whether to implement a full marketing suite or a point solution.
  • The number of marketing suites and point solutions has increased from 50 to more than 800 just in the past five years.
  • IT is receiving a growing number of marketing analytics requests and must be prepared to speak intelligently about marketing management vendor selection.

Resolution

  • Leverage Info-Tech’s comprehensive three-phase approach to MMS selection projects: assess your organization’s preparedness to go into the selection stage, move through technology selection, and present decisions to stakeholders.
  • Conduct an MMS project preparedness assessment to ensure you maximize the value of your time, effort, and spend.
  • Determine whether your organization’s needs will best be met by a marketing management suite or a point solution.
  • Determine which use case your organization fits into and review the relevant vendor landscape, common capability, and areas of product differentiation. Consult Info-Tech’s market analysis to shortlist vendors for your RFP process.
  • Take advantage of traceable and auditable selection tools to run an effective evaluation and selection process. Be prepared to answer the retroactive question “Why this MMS?” with documentation of your selection process and outputs.

Info-Tech Insight

  1. The new MMS market. Selecting a marketing management solution has become increasingly difficult, with the number of players in the marketplace ballooning to meet buyer demand.
  2. Direct translation to revenue. Picking the wrong marketing solution has a direct impact on the bottom line. However, the right MMS can lead to a 7.3x greater year-over-year increase in annual revenue.
  3. Don’t buy best-of-breed; buy best-for-you. Base your vendor selection on your requirements and use case, not on the vendor’s overall performance.

MMS is a key piece of the CRM puzzle

In order to optimize cross-sell opportunities and marketing effectiveness, there needs to be a master customer database, which belongs in the customer relationship management (CRM) suite.

“When it comes to marketing automation capabilities, using CRM is like building a car from a kit. All the parts are there, but you need the time and skill to put it all together. Using marketing automation is like buying the car you want or need, with all the features you want already installed and some gas in the tank, ready to drive. In either case, you still need to know how to drive and where you want to go.” (Mac McIntosh, Marketo Inc.) 'CRM' surrounded by its components with 'MMS' highlighted. A master database – the central place where all up-to-the-minute data on a customer profile is stored – is essential for MMS success. This is particularly true for real-time capability effectiveness and to minimize customer fatigue.

Understand what an MMS can do for you

Take time to learn the capabilities of modern marketing applications. Understanding the “art of the possible” will help you to get the most out of your MMS.

MMS helps marketers in two primary ways:
  1. It allows them to efficiently execute and manage campaigns across dozens of channels and products.
  2. It allows them to analyze the outcomes of campaigns.
Marketing suites accomplish these tasks by:
  • Leveraging workflow automation to reduce the amount of time spent creating marketing campaigns
  • Using internal or third-party data to increase conversion effectiveness from customer databases across the organization
A strong MMS provides marketers with the data they need for actionable insights about their customers.		 “A marketing automation solution delivers essentially all the benefits of an email marketing solution along with integrated capabilities that would otherwise need to be cobbled together using various standalone technologies.” (Marketo Inc.)

Review Info-Tech’s vendor profiles of the MMS market to identify vendors that meet your requirements

Logos of multiple vendors including 'Hubspot', 'IBM', 'Salesforce marketing cloud', etc.

Use Info-Tech’s MMS implementation methodology as a starting point for your organization’s MMS selection

Info-Tech’s implementation methodology is not a step-by-step approach to vendor selection, but rather it highlights the pertinent considerations for MMS selection at each of the five steps outlined below.

1

2

3

4

5
Establish Resources Gather Requirements Write and Assemble RFP Exercise Due Diligence Evaluate Candidate Solutions
  • Determine work initiative dependencies and project milestones.
  • Establish the project timeline.
  • Designate project resources.
  • Prioritize rollout of functionality.
  • Link business goals with the MMS selection project.
  • Determine user roles and profiles.
  • Conduct stakeholder interviews.
  • Build communication and change management plan.
  • Draft an RFP.
  • Make a plan for soliciting feedback and publishing the RFP.
  • Customize a vendor demo script and scorecard.
  • Conduct vendor demos.
  • Speak with vendor references.
  • Evaluate nonfunctional requirements.
  • Understand upgrade schedules.
  • Define a vendor evaluation framework.
  • Prepare the final evaluation.
  • Prepare a presentation for management.

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

Professional services provider engages Info-Tech to guide it through its MMS selection journey

CASE STUDY
Industry: Professional Services | Source: Info-Tech Consulting

Challenge

A large professional services firm specializing in knowledge development was looking to modernize an outdated marketing services stack.

Previous investments in marketing tools ranging from email automation to marketing analytics led to system fragmentation. As a result, there was no 360-degree overview of marketing operations and no way to run campaigns at scale.

To satisfy the organization’s aspirations, a comprehensive marketing management suite had to be selected that met needs for the foreseeable future.

Solution

The Info-Tech consulting team was brought in to assist in the MMS selection process.

After meeting with several stakeholders, MMS requirements were developed and weighted. An RFP was then created from these requirements.

Following a market scan, four vendors were selected to complete the organization’s RFP. Demonstration scripts were then developed as the RFPs were completed by vendors.

Shortlisted vendors progressed to the demonstration phase.

Results

Vendor scorecards were utilized during the two-day demonstrations with the core project team to score each vendor.

During the scoring process the team also identified the need to replace the organization’s core customer repository (a legacy CRM).

The decision was made to select a CRM before finalizing the MMS selection. Doing so ensured uniform system architecture and strong interoperability between the firm’s MMS and its CRM.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

Guided Implementation

Workshop

Consulting
"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Select a Marketing Management Suite – project overview

1. Launch the MMS Project and Collect Requirements 2. Shortlist Marketing Management Suites 3. Select Vendor and Communicate Decision to Stakeholders
Supporting Tool icon

Best-Practice Toolkit

1.1 Assess the value and identify your organization’s fit for MMS technology.

1.2 Build your procurement team and project customer experience management (CXM) strategy.

1.3 Identify your MMS requirements.

2.1 Produce your shortlist

3.1 Select your MMS

3.2 Present selection

Guided Implementations
  • Understand CXM strategy and identify your fit for MMS technology.
  • Identify staffing needs.
  • Plan requirements gathering steps.
  • Discuss use-case fit assessment results.
  • Discuss vendor landscape.
  • Create a procurement strategy.
  • Discuss executive presentation.
  • Conduct a proposal review.
Associated Activity icon

Onsite Workshop

 Module 1:
Launch Your MMS Selection Project		 Module 2:
Analyze MMS Requirements and Shortlist Vendors		 Module 3:
Plan Your Procurement Process
Phase 1 Outcome:
  • Launch of MMS selection project
 Phase 2 Outcome:
  • Shortlist of vendors
 Phase 3 Outcome:
  • Selection of MMS

Use these icons to help direct you as you navigate this research

Use these icons to help guide you through each step of the blueprint and direct you to content related to the recommended activities.

A small monochrome icon of a wrench and screwdriver creating an X.

This icon denotes a slide where a supporting Info-Tech tool or template will help you perform the activity or step associated with the slide. Refer to the supporting tool or template to get the best results and proceed to the next step of the project.
A small monochrome icon depicting a person in front of a blank slide.

This icon denotes a slide with an associated activity. The activity can be performed either as part of your project or with the support of Info-Tech team members who will come onsite to facilitate a workshop for your organization.
A small monochrome icon depicting a descending bar graph.

This icon denotes a slide that pertains directly to the Info-Tech vendor profiles on marketing management technology. Use these slides to support and guide your evaluation of the MMS vendors included in the research.

Select a Marketing Management Suite

PHASE 1

Launch the MMS Project and Collect Requirements

Phase 1 outline

Associated Activity icon Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Guided Implementation 1: Launch Your MMS Project and Collect Requirements

Proposed Time to Completion: 3 weeks
Step 1.2: Structure the Project Step 1.3: Gather Requirements
Start with an analyst kick-off call:
  • Review readiness requirements for an MMS project.
  • Understand the work initiatives involved in MMS selection.
 Review findings with analyst:
  • Determine use case based on your organizational alignment.
  • Discuss core MMS requirements.
Then complete these activities…
  • Conduct an organizational MMS readiness assessment.
 Then complete these activities…
  • Identify best-fit use case.
  • Elicit, capture, and prioritize requirements.
With these tools & templates:
  • MMS Readiness Assessment Checklist
 With these tools & templates:
  • MMS Requirements Picklist Tool
Phase 1 Results:
  • Completed readiness assessment.
  • Refined project plan to incorporate selection and implementation.

Phase 1 milestones

Launch the MMS Project and Collect Requirements — Phase 1

  • Understand the MMS market space.
  • Assess organizational and project readiness for MMS selection.
  • Structure your MMS selection and implementation project by refining your MMS roadmap.
  • Align organizational use-case fit with market use cases.
  • Collect, prioritize, and document MMS requirements.

Shortlist MMS Tool — Phase 2

  • Review MMS market leaders and players within your aligned use case.
  • Review MMS vendor profiles and capabilities.
  • Shortlist MMS vendors based on organizational fit.

Select an MMS — Phase 3

  • Submit request for proposal (RFP) to shortlisted vendors.
  • Evaluate vendor responses and develop vendor demonstration scripts.
  • Score vendor demonstrations and select the final product.

Step 1.1: Understand the MMS market

1.1

1.2

1.3
Understand the MMS Market Structure the Project Gather MMS Requirements

This step will walk you through the following activities:

  • MMS market overview

This step involves the following participants:

  • Project team
  • Project manager
  • Project sponsor

Outcomes of this step

  • An understanding of the evolution of the MMS market space and how it helps today’s organizations.
  • An evaluation of new and upcoming trends sought by MMS clients.
  • Verification of whether an MMS is a fit with your organization.

Speak the same language as the marketing department to deliver the most business value

Marketing Management Suite Glossary

Analytics The practice of measuring marketing performance to improve return on investment (ROI). It is often carried out through the visualization of meaningful patterns in data as a result of marketing initiatives.
Channels The different places where marketers can reach customers (e.g. social media, print mail, television).
Click-through rate The percentage of individuals who proceed (click-through) from one part of a marketing campaign to the next.
Content management Curating, creating, editing, and keeping track of content and client-facing assets.
Customer relationship management (CRM) A core enterprise application that provides a broad feature set for supporting customer interaction processes. The CRM frequently serves as a core customer data repository.
Customer experience management (CXM) The holistic management of customer interaction processes across marketing, sales, and customer service to create valuable, mutually beneficial customer experiences.
Engagement rate A social media metric used to describe the amount of likes, comments, shares, etc., that a piece of content receives.
Lead An individual or organization who has shown interest in the product or service being marketed.
Omnichannel The portfolio of interaction channels you use.

MMS is a key piece of the customer experience ecosystem

Within the broader CXM ecosystem, an MMS typically lives within the CRM platform. Interfacing with the CRM’s master customer database allows an MMS to optimize cross-sell opportunities and marketing effectiveness.

A master database – the central place where all up-to-the-minute data on a customer profile is stored – is essential for MMS success. This is particularly true for real-time capability effectiveness and to minimize customer fatigue.

If you have customer records in multiple places, you risk missing customer opportunities and potentially upsetting clients. For example, if a client has communicated preferences or disinterest through one channel, and this is not effectively recorded throughout the organization, another representative is likely to contact them in the same method again – possibly alienating the customer for good.

A master database requires automatic synchronization with all point solutions, POS, billing systems, agencies, etc. If you don’t have up-to-the-minute information, you can’t score prospects effectively and you lose out on the benefits of the MMS.

 'CRM' surrounded by its components with 'MMS' highlighted.
Focus on the fundamentals before proceeding. Secure organizational readiness to reduce project risk using Info-Tech’s Build a Strong Technology Foundation for CXM and Select and Implement a CRM Platform blueprints.
Select a Marketing Management Suite preview picture

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 8 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Launch the MMS project and collect requirements
  • Call 1: Understand CXM strategy and identify your fit for MMS technology.
  • Call 2: Identify staffing needs.
  • Call 3: Plan requirements gathering steps.

Guided Implementation 2: Shortlist marketing management suites
  • Call 1: Discuss use-case fit assessment results.
  • Call 2: Discuss vendor landscape.

Guided Implementation 3: Select vendor and communicate decision to stakeholders
  • Call 1: Create a procurement strategy.
  • Call 2: Discuss executive presentation.
  • Call 3: Conduct a proposal review.

Author

Samuel Leese

Contributors

  • Sara Camden, Digital Change Agent, Equifax
  • Caren Carrasco, Lifecycle Marketing and Automation, Benjamin David Group
  • 10 Anonymous Contributors

Related Content: Customer Relationship Management

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