Marketing and Sales are the two main pillars of every business, no doubt about that! How do you play between marketing and sales to get the right sync of every associated process, so businesses run smoothly? That’s where automation comes into place so that any time anything pops up, it can be addressed.
In a nutshell, marketing and sales automation help you manage your business hassle-free, even during your offline hours or holidays!
Wondering how, right?
Let’s get in to understand it in detail.
What is Sales and Marketing Automation?
The process of Sales and Marketing Automation is wholesome of activities that are happening between the two teams and streamlining them, which results in better sales and conversions. It helps the business to align between marketing and sales easily and move ahead with the business operations seamlessly.
For marketing, it helps to generate more leads. For sales, it helps you to leverage nurturing. Sales and automation tools are very much available today, which helps you with some attractive insights to help you arrive at the best decisions for your business. Moreover, it helps you understand and track your customers' behavior and hence makes you take a completely personalized approach to close the deals.
What is in it for sales?
Well, this is a valid question to seek from every business. Ultimately a Closed deal is everything for any business. And that;’s what Sales do. Now, how do you boost your sales?
What can be the best approach for your sales?
These are some of the challenges associated with the sales of every business. However, with the right automation platforms, you get through seamlessly to proceed with hassle-free business operations.
Now, sales benefit a lot from your marketing automation. Consider the below essentials that help your team to be more productive and efficient:
Streamline your middle and top-of-the-funnel prospects.
Simplify your sales process
Offer a completely personalized way of communication.
Helps you track the behavior of your prospects
Helps your prospects in the funnel to visit your website and track them.
Complete campaign tracking for an efficient process
Scores the lead based on its activities - visiting the brand website, following on social media, responding to emails, and more.
So, all of these come jointly with marketing and sales.
So, in a nutshell, we can say that your sales team gets everything it needs from marketing. It helps you track your leads' behavior and helps you tackle their needs with a completely personalized approach.
Here are some of the benefits your sales team gets from marketing automation:
#1 Access to Web Analytics
Closely observe how far your prospect has traveled throughout the funnel. Having an intimate understanding of this will help you track down the complications. You know when your prospect visits your brand website or follows you on social media. These metrics can be used to give you a segmented approach while communicating with the lead.
#2 Optimize your Campaign Performance
Your marketing team runs and manages the campaigns. Keeping a close eye on the digital patterns of the lookalike audience, you can easily optimize your campaigns and gain more insights to help you get optimum results for your campaigns. It helps you better understand who engages with your brand and what channel or source they come from. A clear understanding of this will help you optimize the source more effectively for good results.
#3 Score your leads based on their interest
Not every lead your marketing team generates is valid. You can score the leads based on the activities they do. For example, the score can be true if someone visits your website. Same way. If someone revisits or has opened your email multiple times or followed you on social media are some of the criteria that define the lead's interest level. By scoring them, you can differentiate between high-priority and low-priority leads and approach them easily and effectively.
So, these are just some of the (but never limited to! ) benefits your sales team would achieve from the power of Marketing automation.
Now, let’s look at what your Marketing Team gets from it.
What is in it for your marketing team?
Sales automation has a lot to do with your marketing. The power of machine learning does a lot for your business to get it streamlined. Even though it is more focused to streamline your sales activities, marketing has a lot of things to gain from it. Let's examine a few of them.
CRM is the major advancement for your marketing team. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is all your marketing team needs to manage the leads, capture them from the right platforms, and get the best out of them. A CRM helps you drive better business results by helping you manage and optimize the leads, segmenting them based on the best possible workflows. It also helps you maintain a lead-nurturing platform that your sales can use.
Why is sales marketing automation important for your business?
Automation is a necessity for today’s businesses. Businesses need to thrive with the best results. Automation helps you do so. With technology advancing daily, keeping up with the trends is equally important. Marketing automation helps you automate and streamline processes and optimize and personalize your campaigns to yield better leads. Sales Automation is focused on the elimination of repetitive tasks, follow-ups, pipeline leads, and, finally, lead acquisition.
Save more time, and generate more revenue - this is what automation is meant for you. But sometimes, it goes beyond to streamline your complete business operations, helping the business owners to make wise decisions and keep up with the trends. On top of everything, it helps you to nurture your client relationships.
Some of the major benefits your business enjoys with Sales and Marketing automation:
#1 Save more time
With automation, you enjoy saving more time as you do not have to break your head on the recurring or repetitive tasks of all time. By automating, you just need to configure the workflow properly and then rest, and the system makes it for you.
#2 Less cost, more revenue
Saving costs is another major boon of marketing automation. Save your cost by automating your tasks. Lessen manual intervention and hence reduce the resource cost. Invest in marketing automation software and enjoy more revenue growth for your business year after year.
#3 Hassle-free lead generation and nurturing
Lead generation and nurturing become much simplified with automation. The lead automatically falls into the CRM and gets assigned based on the configured workflow. Also, those leads that are in the middle of the funnel would be automatically nurtured so that they are prepared to be made sales-ready someday.
#4 Boost your customer relationships
Have a positive impact on your customer relationships - this is a very important aspect of automation for your business. You receive your customer queries instantly, and with a proper helpdesk system, you can resolve the tickets effectively with less turnaround time.
#5 Personalize your customers' lifecycle
Personalization is a key for every marketing and sales. It would be best if you personalized your communication throughout the cycle so that every prospect gets the proper attention.
#6 Marketing & Sales Alignment
This is the most important benefit that your business enjoys with automation. Marketing and Sales are the two main pillars of every business. Bringing them together is the biggest challenge that businesses would face - with automation, you get it done easily and seamlessly, yielding better results of all time.
When you look for Sales Marketing automation for your business, these are some of the actors to consider:
CRM automation
Email Marketing
Sales Pipeline
Lead Scoring
Seamless Integrations with other applications
Reporting Dashboards and Analytics
Landing Pages
Form Tracking and much more.
By utilizing reliable automation software like Hubspot or Yoroflow, you can enjoy relentless benefits for your business, irrespective of the size and type of your business niche.
So, one thing is clear!
Marketing automation means a lot for your business - no matter which type of business or size it falls into. This is the major reason businesses look for all available platforms to help them with automation. Before you rely on software for your needs, you need to streamline your requirements, choose the best one and implement it to yield better results.
How do you automate sales?
Getting your leads through the sales cycle is tough. It takes time to convert. But the sooner you push them, the better the results will be. With automation, you can set the tone right.
Sales automation helps you save time as you can automate most of the admin tasks like contact filling and updation, calendar management, CRm synching of data, and a lot more.
So, in a nutshell, a Sales process is crucial for business as it helps you to convert your leads into customers. With efficient software in place for your business, you can always keep an eye on your prospects and ensure your communication reaches them at the right time with the right channel so that you can always stay on top of their preferences.
Some of the well-known ways with which you can automate Sales include:
#1 Lead Scoring
Every lead that your marketing team generates has value. It will be a valid Sales Qualified Lead only if it satisfies certain criteria that are specified by the workflow. Some criteria may include complete form information with a valid email address or contact details, financial fitment, target country, or more. So, once your sales team receives a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), then the communication from the sales point of view would be initiated. Lead scoring can be initiated based on the responses taken or activities recorded by the prospect.
Some examples include:
If the prospect immediately responds to your message
If the prospect visits your brand website
If they follow you on social media
They open or respond to your email.
So, these factors define the prospect's interest level, and hence the scoring can also be accurate so that your sales team can pick up the leads with high scores first and then the rest of them. Lead prioritization can be key and can be done using the lead scoring that defines the prospect's interest level.
#2 Sales Email - follow-ups and nurturing
Sales emails are to be personalized. Nobody wants to read advertising or junk emails wherever everything is direct. So, build the sales email templates so that it gives a completely personalized approach to the leads/prospects. Also sales follow-ups can also be automated. Before closing a lead, you can follow up with them thrice a month to ensure they are not interested and then close the lead.
#3 Schedule the meeting schedule
Get in touch with the prospects at a time they are comfortable with. You can schedule the meetings and calls easily and effectively with sales automation techniques so that you drive the campaign effectively.
#4 Build your lead lists
Lead lists are nothing but segmented lists that you can make based on various criteria - like target cities, age groups, demographic, or even other business-related criteria. By segmenting them, you can set up the conversation and the campaigns in a completely personalized manner so that it reaches them correctly and gets you better responses. A General or a common approach is never recommended as it would have more of a sales pitch.
#5 Lead information
As mentioned earlier, a lead is not just contact information; it needs to have all details related to the lead so that your sales team can approach them with a personalized tone. No-sales approach is always recommended. So, with custom-built tools, you can enrich your lead's information once it's synced with your CRM so that before it reaches your sales, it will have all the information related to it for your team to pick it up with the best conversational tone.
So, Sounds great?
Are you ready to start the Sales Marketing automation for your business?
It’s easy!
