How to Evangelize Oracle Eloqua Inside Your Organization

I’m a marketing geek at my very core. I love talking about technology, metrics and moving buyers along a journey. I read articles about marketing in my spare time. I study people in the industry who are doing new things. I LinkedIn-stalk leaders in the space. I love everything about marketing.

My wife, an elementary school teacher, will graciously listen to me ramble on for about 30 minutes before she reaches her limit of geek talk for the day. She’s not as in love with marketing as I am. Few people are.

Nearly five years ago, I brought Oracle Eloqua into the fast-growing tech startup I was working at. I had been using lesser tools at previous jobs to do demand generation and marketing automation. Now, I had my hands on the industry leader. I was so pumped! But, I quickly found out that others in my company were not as jazzed as I was. (I’m not sure why I didn’t anticipate this happening given my own wife’s reaction to marketing geek talk). Didn’t they see the potential? Couldn’t they wrap their minds around how much better life was going to be now that we had Oracle Eloqua?

They thought it was just a tool for the marketing department to do whatever it is that marketing departments do. They didn’t really know what the marketing team did; let alone why a new software platform was so exciting for me. They were indifferent because they didn’t think Oracle Eloqua would affect their life in any way. Once I came to this realization, I knew what I had to do. I had to market to our internal teams about the power of this new tool. I had to show people that this wasn’t just a tool for the marketing team; it was a platform the entire organization could benefit from. As I began to evangelize the greatness of Oracle Eloqua to other departments, interest grew. It took some time, but eventually people from sales, support, and implementation (and others) wanted to pick my brain about using Oracle Eloqua to automate and streamline their tasks.

It took a lot of work, but in the end, it paid off. What was once thought of as just a toy for the marketing team had now become an organization-wide efficiency-producing machine.

Here are some things you can do to evangelize Oracle Eloqua within your own organization.

1) Train, train, train
Let’s be honest. Oracle Eloqua is a grown-up tool. You can do so much with it, but most people in your organization think it’s just an expensive email platform. They don’t get it because it’s not their job to get it. You need to find ways to train the organization on how the platform works, how you expect people to use it, and what they will gain by adopting a new way of doing their job.

Set up a one-on-one session when new sales members join the organization. Ask to make a presentation at the quarterly or yearly sales meeting. Talk to the leaders of your customer support and account management teams about what they would like to see Oracle Eloqua do for their teams. Set up Lunch-and-Learns for anyone who’s interested. Send out an internal quarterly newsletter to your field and channel sales teams. Whatever it takes, it will pay dividends in the long run to create a company-wide adoption of Oracle Eloqua. Adoption within the organization will allow you to try new things, get additional budget when you need it, and be seen as an organization-wide critical asset.

2) Find some guinea pigs
When looking for people to help you spearhead Oracle Eloqua, ask them to be a champion rather than a guinea pig. Look for people who are early adopters, who like technology and who are seen as leaders within their team. I suggest going after a small handful of sales people who fit this bill. Spend the extra time working with them to fully utilize the tool. Create templates they can use in Engage. Show them how they can increase sales with Discover and Profiler. Design some triggered drip campaigns that they can place people into right from CRM. Provide them with feedback on how their efforts are paying off in terms of time saved and deals closed.

It won’t take long for these guinea pigs (or champions) to start singing your (and Oracle Eloqua’s) praises to the rest of their teams. Pretty soon, everyone will be coming to you for the same guidance you provided the others. Once you help sales people realize how much more money than can make using Oracle Eloqua, it’s instant adoption. Once the sales team is onboard, repeat this process with other divisions, making sure to highlight items that are important to each team. For example, reducing time to resolution for support staff or improving customer satisfaction for your implementation team.

3) Internal marketing campaign
Why not use the power of Oracle Eloqua to inform and educate internal people like you do for prospects? You could create a quarterly newsletter that highlights the key things the marketing team has been working on. Build a drip campaign that goes to new employees that’s focused around onboarding topics. Create an internal survey around training needs that utilizes blind form submits. All of these ideas are easy to implement. Just take a few minutes to focus on how you would “market” to internal folks in order to educate, build unity, or take the pulse on where things are. Greater visibility into what the marketing team is working on will help provide traction for making Oracle Eloqua a key system throughout the organization.

4) Use it for important notices
Every so often, there is an important internal communication that needs to be seen by everyone in the organization. Usually, these are key updates to an HR policy, benefits changes, or important company-wide announcements. Typically, an email is sent out, but there is no way to track who opened or interacted with it. By using Oracle Eloqua instead of your corporate email client, you gain visibility into these important notices. You could even build a campaign that checks if people have interacted with the notices and send follow-ups to those who haven’t. Using Oracle Eloqua for important notices is a great way to gain further adoption of the platform and ensures that everyone has seen important information they need to know about.

5) Create an onboarding campaign for new customers
Sometimes marketers are so focused on bringing in new business that they forget about the importance of recurring revenue and customer retention. Why not use Oracle Eloqua to start off with a positive experience right from the get-go?

I suggest creating an onboarding campaign for new customers that sends out a series of communications about who to contact for help, who the account managers will be, where to go for online support, helpful training resources, information on local user groups, how to get the most out of your product in the first three months, or whatever else would be important for a new customer to know about. As you build (and add to) these campaigns, you will help new customers understand what to do, where to go for help, and what they can expect from your company. It also has the added bonus of making those implementation, support, and account management folks very happy that Oracle Eloqua is in place.

6) Templates for everyone
Everyone in the organization has things they send out regularly that are standardized to some extent. Sales proposals, invoices from accounting, product release notes, you name it. There are standard pieces of content that could be created in Oracle Eloqua that help save time and allow for interaction to be tracked. Create the assets for each team, assign them to a folder and give each of the teams access to Engage within CRM. This way, everyone can use the power of Oracle Eloqua without having to actually go into the backend of the system.

7) Show your metrics Last, but certainly not least, my final tip for evangelizing Oracle Eloqua is to use all that data you’re collecting to show the C-Suite how the marketing team is driving pipeline growth, pipeline velocity and ultimately closed-won deals. Doing the analytics work to show that the efforts of the marketing team are contributing to the bottom line in real dollars is the best way to gain adoption for Oracle Eloqua. Just as the VP of Marketing or CMO shows the executive team analysis of actual percentages, counts and dollars, other areas of the organization will be expected to produce similar hard numbers and move away from gut feelings and inklings. Nothing creates buy-in like the CEO singing the praises of the marketing department!

Those are my thoughts on how to ensure that Oracle Eloqua is seen a vital tool for success. What other ideas have you found that work to create company-wide buy-in for your marketing automation platform?