Marketing Automation - The Method: How Marketing, Sales, Service and Recruiting become one Engine - with Method and AI - (Paperback or Softback)

Your marketing automation platform can do everything. And does nothing.

You rolled out the software: emails, forms, tracks, contacts in lists. It's all there - and yet the most expensive license in the company is quietly dying in "newsletter mode." The problem isn't the tool. It's that no one ever gave it a method. A platform is like a piano: capable of everything - and silent until someone knows the piece.

This book is that piece. Marketing automation isn't a tool, it's a method - a Motor with five strokes (Signal, Assessment, Nurturing, Handoff, Loop) that runs the same everywhere. You learn it once and apply it six times over. One Motor, many Engines - what Norbert Schuster calls People Automation.

One method. Six domains.

• Demand & new-customer acquisition - recognize interest before it grows loud
• Existing customers - the bigger, cheaper lever most companies ignore
• Account-based marketing - the Motor aimed at your target accounts
• Sales - content that carries the long B2B phases after the handoff
• Service - where the Motor closes the loop and turns into new revenue
• Recruiting - because recruiting is the new marketing

AI, finally put in its place. AI isn't the Motor - it's a layer on top of it, working across four levels from data enrichment to the (semi-)autonomous Revenue Engine. You'll see exactly where each AI family - predictive, generative, conversational, agentic - helps, and where it must not decide. Master the method and you add AI one block at a time. Skip it, and AI just does the wrong thing faster.

What you'll take away:

• how to turn a silent platform into a system that learns
• how to read signals instead of guessing who to contact today
• how to hand leads from marketing to sales without the seam tearing (MQL and MQN)
• how to build the Empathic Funnel, score maturity, and orchestrate content that actually steers
• how to measure one Motor across every domain - and where the honest limits are

Built to use, not just to read: the complete Schuster Model®, the Marketing Automation Canvas, the Deep Buyer Persona, field-tested tools and templates, worked calculations, a maturity self-check, dozens of illustrations, and an AI prompt in every chapter you can run on your own company right away.

From a silent platform to a running system.

For marketing and sales leaders in B2B, for anyone aiming to become one, and for managing directors who want automation to be a method - not another tool gathering dust.

By Norbert Schuster - strategy consultant for the digitalization of marketing and sales, managing director of strike2 GmbH, the mind behind the Schuster Model® and creator of the Waterhole Strategy®. For more than fifteen years he has guided B2B companies through marketing automation - what he calls PreSales Automation.