Aligning marketing and sales can sometimes feel like herding cats. The ideal solution is harmonising an effective lead generation and marketing approach with a tried and tested sales strategy. Using marketing automation technology which connects to a CRM system is often the most efficient way to connect sales and marketing, but what does this really involve? Let’s take a look.
Marketing Automation: What Does It Mean?
Marketing automation can mean much more than being able to click ‘send all’ on a group email list or schedule a social media post. It can automate elements of the entire buyer’s journey, from lead generation through to sales conversion, and customer experience.
Automated workflows are about “triggering relevant and timely actions based upon context”. If someone visits your site and expresses an interest in your services – for example, by clicking on a call to action, watching a video or filling a form out – the software will trigger pre-designed responses, such as a personalised follow-up email.
How Does It Influence Sales?
The following tasks can be automated with this type of software:
- Sending your prospect an email or series of emails – for prospecting, following up or lead nurturing
- Assigning new website leads automatically to salespeople based on rules such as location or industry, or distributed equally on a round robin basis
- Creating tasks and reminders for salespeople (for example for enquiries that haven’t been dealt with or for quotes that haven’t been followed up)
- Automatic contract reminders/date-based renewals
- Reminders and marketing for events and trade shows
- Alerts for website revisits and email open notifications
- Cross selling (e.g. if someone buys X but not Y, then email about Y after a number of days)
- Creating call lists and auto-dialling
- Lead scoring to identify the most interested/likely to buy prospects
- Automated referral/review requests
- Sending text messages internally or to the prospect according to a set of rules or trigger conditions
Aligning Sales & Marketing Strategy
Many companies benefit simply by bringing all internal stakeholders onto the same page by making it possible to see reports and analytics of both marketing and sales in the same software.
Sales strategy and marketing automation can go hand-in-hand. Marketing automation software helps you align marketing and sales strategies to help your salespeople become more efficient and produce better results. If you are falling behind your sales targets, get in touch with JDR today. We specialise in helping companies get the best value from marketing automation and other marketing tools and strategies. We also offer a free inbound marketing audit, which is an ideal starting point for establishing where your digital marketing strategy can be improved. Get in touch to arrange a suitable time.
