Better investments into marketing and sales automation systems and proper use of these technologies can hold immense potential for productivity improvements and consistent business growth.
There are a range of benefits to be observed from proper alignment of martech-salestech systems and even more when marketing automation platforms are used in a manner to help drive sales and connect better with sales initiatives.
More than a third of typical marketing and sales operational tasks can be automated. But the secret to driving success with sales and marketing automation lies in aligning fewer systems between teams with the final aim to align goals and outcomes.
Automation is a key driver of cost efficiency and increased sales, if used with the smartest tactics.
For marketing teams that already have a robust marketing automation in place to easily manage and execute marketing tasks, what can be done to further optimize their systems to ensure a boost in sales?
A few tips that can help:
Personalizing a Company Website with Sales-ready Content
Personalization plays a key role in driving ROI from every marketing and sales outreach. When prospects come to your website, they are forming an impression about your product, your service, your brand and overall quality throughout their various interactions.
Personalizing content on your website to drive prospect engagement with sales-ready prompts can help boost conversions and overall ROI.
When marketing and sales teams work together to use one automation system to gather data on online visitors like where they’re from, the companies they work at, their job title, browsing interests, the data can be used to build more personalized website sections and landing pages that align to their role, interest and need.
For instance, if you run an online shop and know that a set of users is interested in specific types of work diaries, building out a landing page that showcases that range of products and presenting that to that set of users first will not only drive their online buying experiences, it will help you build better customer relationships.
Read More: How Strong is your Sales Forecasting Strategy?
Assessing your Prospect’s Online Behavior and Sales-readiness, Across Multiple Online Channels
While it is crucial for marketing and salespeople today to jointly work on improving their website’s content flow to help drive both marketing and sales goals, it is also important for these team’s leaders to use the right automation to assess prospect behavior across other online channels like social media, etc.
Setting up your marketing automation to track all these multiple interests and interactions across channels can help drive personalization and allow sales and marketing teams to automate their next campaigns based on the current interests of each visitor and prospect.
A unified automation platform can act as reference point for both teams, allowing marketing and sales leaders the right visibility into real-time prospect engagement metrics to assess what needs further improvement.
Keeping Prospects Informed with Sales Ready Email Triggers
CTRs are said to be 47% higher for B2B email campaigns than B2C email campaigns. Email prospecting is not going away anytime soon. Given that marketing and sales teams both have to rely on this channel to drive customer conversations and lead nurture campaigns, it can benefit both teams when prospecting efforts are aligned within one marketing automation system to automate email sends to prospects based on their buying stage and what action a lead has taken in the past.
Identifying the right triggers and automating sales emails to nurture prospects can save sales teams considerable time and effort.
For instance, when a prospect shows interest in your pricing page or a particular service or product, sending a relevant email with the right content to keep the prospect interested and to answer any question they may have in mind is a great way to keep your brand top of mind and to get them to move forward in the buying journey.
Read More: Is your B2B Website Sales-Ready?
Strengthening your Lead-Scoring and Lead Nurturing Initiatives As One Unit
One of the biggest points of argument between sales and marketing teams revolves around the quality of leads one hands off to the other. Most times, salespeople complain about not receiving qualified leads.
This is where marketing and sales leaders can align to determine for themselves what makes for a sales-ready lead and where in the handoff should sales get ready to take over the account completely to run their own lead nurture campaigns. A marketing automation platform that is used wisely by both counterparts can streamline this easily, by helping teams put in place an appropriate lead-scoring strategy and allowing teams to set workflows to alert salespeople when they need to take action on a particular account.
A better lead scoring process between marketing and sales can be helpful because it helps salespeople to focus efforts on those leads that will have more monetary value.
Tracking and Testing, All the time!
No marketing and sales team today can get away with running just one kind of outreach or one kind of campaign. Marketing automation comes handy in constantly tracking results, customer data, prospect behavior and more to determine how to get the best sales and marketing results. A unified marketing automation platform can help track multiple campaigns and test the success of different kinds of lead nurture initiatives. A/B testing can further help marketing and sales teams tweak their content to make it more relevant to prospect interest and needs. One platform that helps monitor all of this like your email open rates and landing page analytics can be helpful in finding the most optimal next-step in your processes.
Read More: How can Sales Teams Enhance the Overall Customer Experience and Buying Journey?
Taking the Right Action with your Marketing Automation to Drive Sales
When used correctly, marketing automation can offer a limitless range of benefits to both, sales and marketing teams. Marketers and salespeople who have a thorough understanding of marketing automation systems and how to extract true insights from their analytics can jointly identify up-selling and cross-selling initiative and take the next step to drive those purchases without delay.
Sales is time-sensitive today given the high competitiveness and choice of products in the market, it is crucial for sales and marketing teams to work hand in hand to build joint processes that can give unified insight into prospect engagement, behavior and interest.