Marketing automation is a technology driven mostly by the investments from the marketing department. However it is not meant to be so. It is essentially a tool for educating prospects and optimizing their process of conversion along the buy cycle. So, it is expected that both marketing and sales should embrace this technology. By helping marketing, it is indirectly increasing the efficiency of the sales department.
Nowadays, prospects have become more aware. Perhaps, that is why technology such as marketing automation has prospered. There are no clueless prospects nowadays. With the internet at their disposal, prospects can get as much information as they need online. Sales representatives are not the primary source of information anymore.
This is the reason why digital marketing has become an essential marketing strategy of every business out there. With lead generation programs in place, marketing and sales need to be aligned properly more than anything else. This is because during a prospect’s buy-cycle, they interact both with the marketing and sales departments.
So, in a way marketing automation benefits the sales department in the long run, even more than the marketing team. Here are five reasons why your sales department should be excited about marketing automation.
- Right Place at the Right Time: Since prospects rely more on self-research, talking to a sales representative from your organization is a rare priority. In that case, your sales reps need to time their outreach correctly so that it is relevant. With the help of marketing automation, you can monitor a prospect’s actions. You know what they download or request, you know what they want. You can create email alerts for your sales reps, so that they know when they need to strike, aka call the prospect. Such behavioral alerts reduces response time to great extent, thus converting more leads. The quicker your sales representatives are, the better your outreach will be.
- Alignment with Marketing: To create a quality customer experience, you need to keep the level of your service consistent. It is easier if you can fulfill all the expectations of your prospects. But that sounds like a difficult task in itself. With marketing automation, sales-marketing department alignment become easier, and it results in increased efficiency. Automation platforms come up with a long-term view of a prospect’s activity which is then moved to sales. Sales will also get a detailed view of every interaction so they will have insight into their buy-cycles. Thus marketing can make sure that sales has a greater understanding of what to expect. Moreover sales can provide feedback to marketing that will help improve future campaigns and strategies.
- No More Unready Leads: Not every visitor on your website is a prospect ready to convert. Most of the bottlenecks experienced by sales is that marketing forwards them leads too quickly. It disrupts the harmony between marketing and sales. Marketing automation helps your organization realize that marketing and sales are basically two jigsaw pieces that fit in together perfectly. A competent automation platform will have a lead scoring feature that will let you assign scores to every lead based on their behaviour. Lead scoring helps marketing understand the priority of leads. Depending on the score, they will be able to send only those leads that have high scores or in other words, are qualified enough. Leads need to be engaged in order to qualify and that is becomes clearer when a system of scoring exists. So, sales can rest easy that they will not have to deal with under-qualified leads anymore.
- Build a Meaningful Relationship From the Start: This new breed of customers conduct their own research but they also demand a certain level of personalized service. You have to make sure that your customers feel valued more than anything else. Since customers are more or less aware of the information that they need, they rarely will want to talk to your sales rep. But when they do, you need to be aware of their tastes and preferences and will preferably talk to someone who is familiar as such. Marketing automation helps sales to build meaningful relationships with leads earlier in the buy cycle. Using a trigger-based system, something which is easy to set up on a marketing automation platform, you can send content as well as offers based on a prospect’s individual action. They receive relevant emails and that will make them feel valued. You have to orchestrate a drip campaign symphony in order to create such a relationship. Relevance is the key when it comes to building such relationships.
- Shorten the Sales Cycle: Marketing automation platforms have a wide array of tools that helps you nurture prospects efficiently. So neither sales nor marketing have to engage themselves in manual messaging. This frees up a lot of time to come up with better sales strategies so that the leads remain engaged. It also helps re-engaging cold leads. This system of nurturing leads and leading them to qualification shortens the sales cycle and makes sure the cycle performs efficiently.
Schedule a free consultation here to find out how marketing automation can help your sales team grow more revenue faster.
