Alterian published some data today from the CMO Council, where reportedly over 100 smart, savvy marketers convened to discuss the modern challenges of marketing in today’s envioronment. I’d love to get my hands on more of the topics – or the $299 report, but for now I am content with the free-market copies and write-ups.

One of the shocking things I saw was the two points that MarketingShift pointed out:

• 60 percent of respondents believe that marketing operational transformation is an essential area of focus.
• Only 4.5 percent are very satisfied with their current level of marketing operational visibility, accountability and output.

I think this relates to something I am seeing more and more often, and something I faced at my time at Hyperic. In a world driven by technology, where you can see link throughput in minutes, how do you calibrate your marketing operational measurements to ensure you stay apace? Aparently only 4.5% of these folks have figured it out. I had a pretty decent report going – but it was only weekly, and it was mostly driven through spreadsheets because of the nature of the data. We had data from externally hosted downloads & CDNs; multiple websites & technologies for Forums, wiki, tickets etc; adwords; and of course the CRM. That is a lot of data to fuse – and not all of it is in your control for formatting since its externally hosted or a package.

The logical thing to think about is placing it all in the CRM. But that misses oodles of traffic as it only captures actual leads. What about all the traffic you didn’t end up capturing? That’s where a marketing automation tool comes in handy. That is where a marketing automation tool comes in handy. There are several out there – from Eloqua, Marketo and of course, my favorite, LoopFuse. Plugging these systems in so its easy to capture this information, integrate it to your CRM and report on it is what marketers need. There are still some things lacking in this regard from all the packages. From ease of use to reporting customizations, there are many things to be done to smooth the path forward for most marketers. My bet though is the 4.5% of those marketers who are satisfied, have looked in the direction of marketing automation for these answers.