There are exactly 2 reasons to use marketing automation, 2 ways to “profit” from it:
- Identify the prospects whose timing is changing to your advantage.
- Build a relationship with prospects whose timing is yet to change.
Everything else is just frosting, features to make marketers’ day-to-day lives easier. From a business perspective, the ROI of marketing automation comes down to these two points.
Notice the common factor in both of these points? Timing.
We’ve all heard that “timing is everything in sales”. This is 100% true. You can’t force someone to buy if their timing isn’t right.
Let’s drive it home…
How many prospects do you have in your database? 2,000? Let’s add some zeroes. 20,000? 200,000? 2,000,000?
Whatever the scale of your business, ask yourself this question:
What percentage of the prospects in your database will buy what you sell –from you or any of your competitors – in the next 90 days?
Those that will buy in the next 90 days are the people whose timing is right. Assuming a B2B scenario, if your business is at all typical, this percentage is very small, commonly less than 1%.
So > 99% of your prospects won’t make a purchase decision in the next 90 days. Why?
Their timing isn’t right.
They don’t have the budget. They’re under contract with a competitor. It’s not a priority right now.
The reasons don’t really matter – the cause is the same. Their timing isn’t right.
So when a prospect’s timing does change to your advantage, how will you know?
Most companies leave this to hope. They hope the prospects will call. They hope the sales person has a followup scheduled (and that they actually followup).
With marketing automation, you don’t have to hope.
Identifying Prospects Whose Timing is Changing to Your Advantage
- Instant Alerts: It’s very common for a prospect to go “cold” on a sales rep. They could be gone, but often they’re just busy.When a prospect returns to your website after 3 weeks – or 6 months – and checks out your pricing page for 3 minutes, that’s a sign that their timing may be changing to your advantage.Trigger an Instant Alert to be sent to the assigned sales rep whenever one of their open opportunities visits your website. We do this and our results are excellent.
Of course you can do the same with any type of activity that indicates a potential change in timing. - Task Scheduling: A close cousin of Instant Alerts, having a task added to a sales rep’s list can move the ball forward.
- Lead Scoring: this can be difficult to use effectively if you have a smaller volume of leads, a small marketing team, or a poor relationship between marketing and sales. While it seems easy, many organizations struggle to get this right.Effective use of lead scoring requires a pretty well understood “customer journey” or buying process. Scoring activity and characteristics can surface the prospects whose timing is changing to your advantage. I’m going to call this an advanced topic and leave it at that.
Ok, so that’s how you identify prospects whose timing is changing to your advantage, but what about the rest of your prospects – literally 99% of your database whose timing is yet to change?
Building a Relationship with Prospects Whose Timing is Yet to Change
- Lead Nurturing: The goal here is to be useful to your prospects so that you earn the right to communicate with them on an ongoing basis.Lead nurturing, done well, is content marketing. It’s providing value to your prospects between now and some point down the road. It’s building trust and reputation with one goal: when their timing begins to change, they think of you as a solution.
- Segmentation: In order to nurture prospects correctly, you have to be able to reach the right group of prospects with the right message.This makes it critical that your marketing automation platform “knows” enough about each prospect and provides the capability to easily treat different groups of prospects appropriately.
- Solid CRM Integration: Segmentation is useless without good data. A smooth integration to Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, or whatever you use is critical to effective lead nurturing.When you marketing automation platform “knows” the state that each prospect is in, your ability to communicate with relevance goes way, way up – and the effectiveness of your lead nurturing goes up with it.
Marketing automation platforms, like the one offered by Net-Results, where I’m founder and CEO, contain lots of other features. They’re all nice to haves.
Landing page builder? Just there to make marketers’ lives easier.
Email builder? Just there to make marketers’ lives easier.
Form builder? Same.
If you want to achieve meaningful ROI with your marketing automation platform, focus on timing while taking full advantage of the other great features that make your life easier.
