How marketing automation can support your sales team

While we call it ‘marketing automation’, technology and software solutions that fall under that banner do as much for marketing teams as they do for sales teams.

Marketing automation helps marketers and marketing departments to more effectively and more precisely market across multiple channels online and to automate repetitive yet essential tasks. And in doing so, it helps sales teams to identify potential customers and automate the process of nurturing those leads to sales-readiness more effectively.

While marketing is much bigger than just sales, when it comes to marketing automation, what’s good for marketing is also very good for sales. Some argue that marketing automation actually does more for sales teams than it does for marketing teams.

What is marketing automation?

The term marketing automation describes software and technology packages that help businesses to more effectively market across multiple channels while automating repetitive tasks. The processes and actions that it automates are those that nudge prospects closer and closer to a time and place where they are ready and open to being approached by your sales team.

In doing so, it takes a lot of the man hours and manual handling out of the process of getting potential customers to the point where they are open to being directly approached by your sales team. Data gained through marketing automation can also be used to inform your choice of marketing activities.

Importantly, marketing automation platforms and CRM software are two very different business tools that work together and complement each other. While your CRM is customer-centric and provides a comprehensive view of your customers, marketing automation focuses on delivering personalised marketing campaigns and messaging to specific customer at specifically the right time.

In doing so, marketing automation will help you to streamline your marketing activities, automate marketing campaigns and gain customer insights based on data.

The relationship between marketing automation and sales

Marketing automation helps support the sales cycle by more effectively ensuring that your sales team has access to a steady flow of qualified leads. 

These interactions can be monitored, with real-time alerts sent to your sales team (through your CRM) when actions, such as contact forms filled in, specified links clicked, or eDM campaigns viewed, have been completed.

All of this provides sales teams with real-time information telling them when the right time is to reach out to the lead and how to best serve each specific lead’s specific needs at that specific time. Without these insights, the activities and timing of your salespeople may actually be doing more harm than good when it comes to closing sales.

Get the right leads for better conversion rates

Nothing frustrates a salesperson more than spending hours calling and emailing leads who never make a purchase. Marketing automation reduces such instances through lead scoring, which enables marketing teams to effectively screen leads and only forward leads to the sales team when they’re ready to be converted.

Through marketing automation, marketers will define rules for scoring leads by aggregating their behaviours and characteristics. Monitoring the quality of the lead through marketing automation means only leads that are ready to have a sales conversation are passed on to the sales team.

Weeding out cold leads and only passing on leads that are ready to have a sales conversation increases the efficiency of your sales team, while also avoiding cold calling and potentially scaring off leads that are barely lukewarm.

Strategic lead nurturing

With marketing automation, cold leads don’t simply stay cold and unattended to. Rather than left to get colder and colder, they get gently massaged and nurtured over time through strategically considered and timely distributed content marketing.

Instead of having a competitor capture their attention and draw them away, marketing automation enables you to deftly nurture them through targeted content and emails until they become sales-ready.

Empower sales team with email automation

With marketing automation, your sales team are empowered to set up their own email marketing campaigns to follow up in a personalised way with more customers.

Lead-enabling and relationship building personal details such as first and last name and position in the company can easily be pulled into your email campaigns from your CRM to personalise them for each lead. Your salespeople can also set up and enforce rules that allow them to send these emails at optimal times and frequencies.

Are you ready to make the jump?

More efficient and strategic lead generation inevitably leads to business growth. Automating some of the steps and processes between marketing and sales will enable your business to put more time and effort into nurturing the leads that have real potential. Doing so will free up time for bigger picture tasks, such as reviewing busines strategy, which may not get the attention they deserve.