Marketing Automation from a Sales Perspective

When you hear the term marketing automation, sales is not always what comes to mind, but when you learn more about the software it is easy to see that sales benefits just as much as marketing from the tool. The goal of marketing automation is to increase ROI. One way it does this is by offering many features that will really improve the efficiency of your sales team. I have come up with a list of the top 3 ways that marketing automation is used through sales to help your sales team get excited about this new software!

• Automated Sales Alerts – The system monitors all prospects and allows you to set automated alerts when someone takes action, for example if you want to be alerted every time someone searches for pricing you will be sent an alert automatically when someone searches for it.  Along with the alerts, the sales team will receive daily updates of any activity that a prospect has taken in the past 24 hours.
• Lead Scoring and Grading – This aspect of the system is something your sales team will find extremely useful. Instead of cold-calling and chasing after leads with no interest in your product, this feature allows the leads to come to your sales team prioritized in a list of those most likely to become opportunities. Lead scoring adds points for every activity the prospect does on your website. You are able to customize the amount of points and what activities will get points. For example, when they search pricing a lead may get 5 points, but just landing on your page would give them 1 point. This helps weed out people who accidentally came upon your site. Lead grading works along with lead scoring to triage leads, it gives your lead a grade based on how closely they fit the criteria of you ideal customer. Criteria used to grade a lead can be company size, location, industry, or anything else you feel is necessary to give a company a proper grade. Together they act as a great way to figure out which leads you need to follow up with first.
• Automated Lead Nurturing - This is a great way for your sales team to keep up with those leads that are not yet sales ready. Using drip nurturing programs, your sales team can reach out to these leads periodically so when they are ready to take that next step they remember your company. It is hard to keep up with leads that need to wait a little longer before making a decision, and this enables personalized e-mails to be sent without taking any time from the sales team.