In the modern day, sales representatives have a redefined role. Like it or not, they are no longer customers’ main source of information or contact point when they want to know more about a product, service or the marketplace in general.
Marketing automation, a software that provides a collection of qualified leads and valuable informational data about each and every of those leads, is definitely not just for marketing teams. Its functions impact the whole sales process and will determine the quality of your customers’ entire sales experience.
Marketing automation will help you unlock the best sales potential for your team through an intuitive system that connects your marketing strategies to seamless alignment with your sales’, making your customer’s purchasing journey a smooth, credible and efficient one.
Marketing automation — perhaps the most powerful tool marketers have at their disposal – may be the proverbial bridge between Marketing and Sales. In truth, these systems may even benefit Sales more than their intended comrades in Marketing.
-Hubspot
Common Sales Problems
- Whom should I reach out to and where?
- Which leads should I prioritize and call first?
- How can I prepare myself for an engaging talk with them?
For sales, marketing automation is the encompassing anchor tool that helps to align sales and marketing tasks. With a click of a few buttons, it conveniently helps streamline the qualified leads, their activities and interactions in the marketing funnel, allowing sales teams to strategise for personalised and relevant experience for prospects when reaching out to them.
Sales will be able to close deals professionally, confidently and most importantly, systematically. The efficiency for sales team lies in knowing which leads to follow up with first and the most effective way to engage them, alot of better time allocation and management is achieved with these systematic, well recorded processes.
-Emailmonday, 2018
Why Marketing Automation Is the Solution For These Sales Problems
Shorten the sales cycle
It goes without saying that the shorter the sales cycle and the faster a business closes the deal is the ideal goal for any sales team. Nurtured leads close faster and generate larger deals because they have been appeased with information that they want on the product or service and are now convinced to buy.
Marketing automation scoring does the precise tabulation for you when a lead has shown sufficient interest and is hot and ready to be passed on to sales for closing with this superb function called the lead scoring system, that passes them along once the lead has reached the minimum scoring threshold.
Your sales team can interact and engage the leads according to the data and interaction they have in the marketing funnel, hence, all emails can be personalised using the marketing automation system itself. With trigger emails set up to represent sales reps on their behalf, personalised with dynamic content and customised offers and information according to the lead’s needs or interests, you are able to engage the leads within the fastest time possible, with content that appeals to them.
One of the fastest ways to make your investment in marketing automation pay for itself is to implement a system for responding to leads within one hour of them contacting you.
Triggered emails have been shown to perform three times better than other types of emails
Reach out at the right time
Marketing automation provides an easy access and view to your corporate website with its tracking abilities, marketing can reach out to these leads when they are engaging with the site and nurture them till they are high-value leads. Sales can then call the leads and discuss their needs at the right time, providing solutions they need based on their current website activity.
Your prospects are on diverse channels, they are all over the place, whether it’s browsing social media, using web search engines like Google, saw an advertisement on TV or through podcasts or events.
Marketing automation allows you track each interaction your prospect has with your company regardless the channel, and reach out to them at the right time. Reaching out to them at the wrong will only make you look pushy, unprofessional and inexperienced. Your message to a prospect not only has to be the right one, it has to be delivered to them at the right time, sales increase only with relevant content and successful engaging.
With lead scoring profiles based on website activity set up, you can set alerts to go out to sales reps whenever a lead interacts with a high-value page such as a “sign up for an account page”, demo requests, inquiry page or when they are viewing your pricing page repeatedly and staying for a long time.
Talking to a sales representative is rarely the top priority for a prospect doing research, so timing has to be impeccable if you want your outreach to be seen as beneficial and relevant.
Integrating the entire customer experience
For a very long time, businesses are trying to find a way to seamlessly and effectively align Sales and Marketing to create a holistic customer experience. Syncing up Marketing and Sales should be a mission-critical priority for any business. This will ensure the level of service is consistent and professional, bringing satisfactory sales experiences to prospects and impressing them with the convenience of doing business with your company.
In this day, professional companies have their whole operation streamlined and connected. This is achieved with the help of technology and software such as Marketing Automation.
In this new paradigm of customer empowerment where they help themselves to learn more information on a product or service, doing up all the research they can online possible, it is easy to misunderstand that buyers don’t need to continue receiving value from companies.
Customers want to avoid hearing sales pitches, but at the right time, they do. When they do, they are not going to fall for a scripted message, your sales team has to be armed with thorough information on what suits their needs best and most importantly, an understanding of their preferences.
