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(R), 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(R) and creator of the Waterhole Strategy(R). For more than fifteen years he has guided B2B companies through marketing automation - what he calls PreSales Automation.
