What are the top ways that sales can use marketing automation to its advantage?

Jon Miller of Marketo opened my eyes to this question with two key observations:

Marketing automation gives salespeople more time to sell. Jon reminded me that the best performing marketing organizations contribute about 25% of the sales pipeline. Shocking isn’t it? Who’s contributing the other 75% ? Sales of course. This is a terrible statistic because it means your highly paid sales people are dialing for dollars. If marketing automation is deployed properly, this stat should move marketing’s pipeline contribution to 80% -- giving sales people more time to sell.

Brian Carroll supports this observation with his research as well (Lead Generation for the Complex Sale). Brian’s research revealed that the sales person’s number one wish is “having more time to sell.”

The other observation of course -- sales productivity. Most CEOs in an attempt to increase revenue, hire more sales people. Sure it may work, but it takes time (even the best sales people require six months to ramp up). Jon Miler has numbers that show many of his clients helped their sales people, on average, deliver 50% more business without working any harder, rather working smarter. A 50% improvement in collective revenue of the entire sales force? By investing in marketing automation versus a string of new sales people, one can realize far greater growth.

Marketing automation definitely helps your sales department close sales but it also helps your marketing department cater to those prospects who may not be ready to be passed to sales. Here are a few ways both departments can use marketing automation to their clear advantage:

1. You have a huge list of leads, all of which have different needs and interests. Marketing automation helps you stay relevant with your marketing content by monitoring how those leads interact with your communications. For example, you wouldn't send someone a bunch of pricing information two days after they bounced off your landing page immediately after clicking through your email. You would know to send that person more educational information maybe a bit further down the road. With this information you can create extremely detailed drip marketing campaigns, with customized emails triggered by your prospects' behaviors.

2. Implementing a solid lead scoring system helps marketing know when exactly a lead's timing has become right to buy. Parameters can be set based on what your company's needs are and then the MA system will notify you when a prospect is deemed qualified.

3. The marketing department can feed the sales team more qualified leads instead of wasting time with lukewarm prospects. After marketing nurtures the lead through the buying process through precise drip marketing campaigns, they'll know specifically who's interested in what and when their timing is perfect. Sales has an easier job closing sales and marketing doesn't have to worry about salespeople not following through with the leads they provide. The teams become much more cohesive.

These are some of the biggest reasons in favor of implementing a marketing automation system -- of course there are countless others depending on how advanced you get with how you use the software.

Lauren:

A few ways that sales can use automation to its own advantage.

1. Collaborate with sales on the development of a lead management process. Numerous studies have shown that automation with no process will not yield the exponential revenue results that companies need. As seen here by Sirius Decisions, the pairing of process with automation far out paces automation as a stand alone - http://trueinfluence.com/blog/campaign-automation/420-calculating-the-roi-of-...

In order to ensure the process is developed and implemented properly, it takes the combination of both marketing and sales to work together and thus transform the way they are managing leads and buyer engagement. Once this is established the benefit of automation for both marketing and sales will increase dramatically.

2. Users of automation should be creating sales nurture campaigns for leads that are in the sales qualified i.e. latter part of the pipeline. By providing sales the ability to launch information through an integration between automation and CRM, you are keeping the engagement going with the customer and truly enabling sales to increase the time to sale. In order for this to be effective, sales must be involved in the development of these campaigns and assist marketing in identifying the proper content to be used at this stage of the buy cycle.

3. One final way is reviewing the behavioral patterns and thereby getting a better understanding of their buyer's profile. Marketing and sales departments (and for that matter customer support departments) ought to be consolidating their metrics in order to get a full view of their buyers, their behaviors and what is driving them to purchase.

Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo

Great question, Lauren. While lead nurturing and scoring are top general uses of functions built into marketing automation, here are some tactical examples around leveraging the marketing automation tool to help sales:

1. Estimate an outcome (such as "buy 20+ units" or "buy category x") and route to an appropriate person in field sales or team with product expertise.
2. Analyze the expected duration thru each pipeline stage, and transition or alert the sales team with this info as dates get close.
3. Append external data to inbound or outbound leads such as SIC and Industry, then pass along that info to help sales prepare for the call.
4. Fine-tune the script for sales playbook or offer by putting customer segmentation info into the automation tool.
5. Set rules for disposing leads or capture outcomes in more granular detail for non conversions. By knowing this, marketing can analyze results and help sales reduce source of poor conversion or suggest improvements to specific pipeline stages.

From a Sales perspective a Marketing Automation system with a decent integration directly into their CRM provides:

a) A window into the online interactions the Sales person's prospects have had with the company. ie their web visit history, their download history, their emails opened, clicked history etc
b) A lead/contact score and therefore a means for the Sales rep to rank their contacts by interest level and their actions - who should they call first today...

With these things Sales can prioritize which contacts they spend time on, and be better prepared before they reach out to the contact.

-Kevin

Great question. Here's how:

- By using lead activity alerts to track warm leads & connect when the time's right
- By leveraging lead activity profiles to have personalized conversations
- By identifying the "warm" contacts to focus on from the large list of leads
- By being able to reachout to an inbound lead instantly to request a time to talk
- By sending one-off trackable emails right after a conversation & track progress

There are many other ways you can setup your marketing automation system to benefit the sales team's process & productivity. Overall I think the key benefits are (1) increased productivity (2) shorter time-to-opportunity (3) increased sales

Hope this helps.

Vaibhav Domkundwar
Nurture: The World's Simplest Marketing Automation App
http://www.nurturehq.com