Though sales and marketing departments use different strategies and tactics, their missions are complementary: revenue generation. Adding a marketing automation system to these departments can directly contribute to their collective success, ultimately helping them meet and exceed revenue goals.
What Can You Expect From Marketing Automation?
In a nutshell: increased productivity and effectiveness for both marketing and sales.
Marketing automation systems provide a wide range of software tools that remove much of the manual drudgery from repetitive marketing tasks. Not only are the tools interoperable (i.e., they always work together, whether you use the full suite immediately or scale up over time), they can be integrated with other business-critical tools (e.g., CRM systems), thereby making your toolbox that much richer.
Lead nurturing, account monitoring, campaign design and implementation, sales tracking, conversion, and customer retention can all be improved through marketing automation.
Here’s a short list of immediate benefits:
- Increased efficiency: By its nature, automation boosts efficiency on many fronts. For example, software interoperability and integration make your sales and marketing data much easier to manage and immediately access. Important information is less likely to get lost. And time-savers such as alerts and triggers can be set up to inform sales and marketing teams about important dates, events, and commitments.
- Improved conversion: Since leads can be tracked with greater precision, your teams can accurately assess where they are in the buying cycle, and then set in motion the right sequence of nurturing steps to continue sales momentum. Your team will be able to generate reports and alerts that tell them when a lead should be contacted and what sort of contact should be made.
- Fewer errors: Automation dramatically reduces errors caused by “human glue” – the frequency people touch a system and manually deploy a series of repetitive steps. Even automating the simplest task will have immediate and positive impact on data discrepancies and, in turn, the time it takes to find and fix them.
- Decreased costs: Marketing automation vendors typically offer their platforms as hosted or web-based solutions (e.g., software-as-a-service), which means there is essentially no software to install, nor is there need for internal IT support to keep the system running successfully. Additionally, overall resource efficiencies also effectively decrease costs.
- Increased sales: Marketing automation can help your company increase sales through improved lead nurturing, easier access to customer information, and improved customer service. Customers will appreciate that you can easily respond to their specific requests and needs, interactions with customers will become more meaningful and beneficial, and they will be more likely to become repeat buyers and/or advocates for your company.
4 Ways Marketing Automation Helps Sales and Marketing Succeed
With a marketing automation system in place, your sales and marketing teams will see immediate business benefits that support their goals.
Here are 4 of them:
- Generate better-qualified leads: With capabilities including database segmentation, engagement tracking, lead scoring, CRM integration, and real-time data access, sales and marketing are much better equipped to uncover sales-ready leads. (On average, marketers who use the Act-On platform report a 20% increase in sales-ready leads.)
- Increase the productivity of your database: The in-tandem complement of automated lead nurturing (aka “drip marketing”), real-time lead scoring, and CRM updates keeps databases accurate and, just as important, keeps potential and actual customers continually engaged with your brand, products, and services.
- Increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Good marketing automation systems support both inbound and outbound tactics, as well as extensive data tracking, analysis, and reporting. This combination of capabilities gives marketers a powerful toolbox from which to craft a wealth of cross-channel campaigns – from simple and straight-forward to complex and sophisticated – very quickly. With results known immediately, marketers can make on-the-fly changes and improvements to boost effectiveness and ROI.
- Close more deals: Increased access to real-time information means increased sales. The ability to see – from a single system – what pages and content and forms a lead has engaged with, what questions they’ve asked in phone calls and emails, what their interests and pain points are, what campaigns they’ve received and responded to … all empowers sales teams to react quickly and effectively. (On average, Act-On customers see lead-to-opportunity conversions increase by 17% – 26%, with deal sizes increasing 10%.)
Are you interested in how a comprehensive marketing automation program might boost your sales and marketing efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness? Get in touch and schedule a demo today!
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