It’s no secret that marketing automation is a marketer’s dream come true. Save time! See ROI! Generate leads! Look great to your boss! (Kidding on that last one — kind of.)
What we don’t see as much talk about is how marketing automation is a sales process dream come true as well. It’s common for sales teams to LOVE marketing automation for a few different reasons. Some of those include more leads, better-qualified leads, and generally better communications between departments.
Let’s get into exactly how marketing automation can automate and improve sales processes!
Improve Lead Qualification with Lead Scoring
One of the most important advantages of marketing automation is the ability to help you define which prospects are sales-ready and which still need nurturing.
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Lead scoring enables your marketing and sales teams to work more efficiently. Assigning a score to existing leads helps those teams tailor their efforts for prospects in each stage of the buying cycle, creating a nurturing process that focuses on the needs and concerns of the lead as they arise. Prospects are contacted with relevant content when they’re ready for it.
Plus, in case you missed it, that’s no longer a manual process. Your marketing team no longer has to manually score and qualify contacts before passing those leads to sales. That means that the sales team members receive better-qualified leads more quickly and more easily (because it can sync easily to your CRM, which I’ll talk more about later).
Automate Sales Processes with Marketing Automation Alerts
When it comes to saving time, sometimes the simplest things are the most useful. Alerts are one of those things!
Net-Results Alerts are triggered to alert you that a Contact has met specific conditions. The specific conditions are driven by Segments and can include all kinds of behaviors and attributes. Plus, you can create multiple alerts across multiple segments. Say a lead visited your pricing page after going dark for a while — send an alert. Maybe a lead went above a certain lead score like we just talked about — send an alert.
With Net-Results segmentation, the options are truly endless.
Save time and Effort with CRM Syncs
Why is the importance of a great CRM integration so often overlooked?
Here are Net-Results, we love a lot of CRMs but have a special place in our collective heart for Salesforce, Dynamics, and SugarCRM. Time and time again, we hear from customers that our integration functions better than the integration with previous marketing automation platforms ever did. Hint: that’s a time-saver for sure! Spend less time worrying about integrations breaking and more time on what will actually generate revenue for your organization.
In addition to time, a bidirectional CRM Sync also saves a ton of effort. All of the work that used to be taken up by handoff meetings between marketing and sales can now be automated and spent on more important (and fun!) things.
Another benefit of marketing automation that I don’t see talked about very often — the importance of keeping your data clean and how marketing automation can help! We often repeat “garbage in, garbage out” around here when talking about the importance of good and clean data. It’s the basis of everything you do as a marketer or sales team member; it’d better be reliable! The reality is that it’s really easy for processes to go wrong if your marketing automation platform and CRM don’t have reliable data to make great decisions on.
The good news is, that marketing automation like Net-Results makes it really easy to clean your data and get your syncs in order. It can be as simple as creating a Segment or running a campaign to set things right! You can also use those same segments and/or campaigns to determine what you want to be synced to your CRM and what you don’t; gone are the days of leads marketing hasn’t qualified being pushed to the CRM for your sales team to wade through.
Marketing automation is the best solution for getting your marketing and sales teams on the same page. Let us help you discover how it can become the missing link you’ve searching for! Schedule a free, 20-minute chat with our team here.
Cheers to your success!
