5 Essential Marketing Automation Features for Better Sales

The inconsistent alignment of sales and marketing teams can lead to frequent product conflicts, and this in turn affects the customer experience. However, the reason behind this inconsistency is not a lack of effort, but a lack of effective automated systems. Of course, that’s where marketing automation comes in.

Marketing automation can be a blessing in disguise if leveraged correctly. Even most of the lead nurturing can be executed through automation.

This robust tool for marketers can be just as effective for sales reps when used smartly. It provides information about the lead’s online behavior and the interests, which is then sent to the marketing team. The sales reps can use the same information to understand the lead’s preferences better and make the sales pitch accordingly. Basically, half of their job is done. This is a basic way of leveraging marketing automation.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into how sales reps can leverage marketing automation features for better sales:

1. Contact Insights

Whenever a sales rep picks the phone up to dial a lead, it’s crucial for them to understand that lead. A single call with the lead will not tell you the product they may be interested in or how differently can you make the pitch without hitting the blind spot.

Not to worry, marketing automation is there to the rescue! Using web analytics, a sales rep can gain knowledge about a lead’s buying behavior, their website interests, web pages they viewed and products they showed interest in. This complete behavioral portrait helps reps prepare a sales pitch that includes more information about the products the lead is interested in.

2. Triggered Emails

Before sales reps rush to make that all-important call to the potential lead, it’s better to send relevant content or a promotional email first. Leads won’t necessarily be thrilled by a direct sales call and it’s better to send informative content to leads for them to be educated about the company’s offering. Additionally, leads will want to talk to someone they are familiar with.

Marketers use automated triggered emails to contact new leads or customers as well as return customers. These triggered alerts and emails help sales reps in building a foundation with the potential leads. Once a relationship is formed, then sales reps can start calling those leads to further proceed the buying process.

[bctt tweet=”Dive a bit deeper into how sales reps can leverage marketing automation features for better sales” username=”agilecrm”]

3. Lead Scoring

Conflict between marketing and sales teams arises when sales reps call cold leads and only later realize they’re hitting a dead end. On average, if sales reps are contacting more wrong leads, it will affect ROI and, later, revenue. For the obvious reasons, sales will blame marketing for passing along the wrong lead.

Lead scoring resolves this issue. Assigning a proper rating to every lead, based on their behavior and interests, helps separate actual opportunities from duds. This automation will send regular alerts to the sales team as well, they can then categorize hot leads and cold leads based on the scores. Marketing strategy like this saves sales reps time and it increases the lead qualifying success rate.

4. Lead Response Time

Once you start converting your potential customers into leads, it becomes imperative to have timely follow-ups with them. According to researchers, delaying the follow-ups with qualified leads, even for only an hour, will drastically lower the chances of success. The response time plays a very crucial role for both the parties (sales rep and lead).

Marketing automation in this case can do wonders for the sales reps, especially since they get real-time notifications to respond to a lead’s queries or requests. These alerts help reduce the response time and ensure that sales reps follow-up within five minutes, which in turn increases the lead qualifying success rate.

5. Sales Alert

Sending real-time alerts to sales reps streamlines the process between the marketing and sales teams. Imagine if a sales rep just closed an opportunity with a lead, and this lead went to the pricing page again. Here, the sales rep can get an alert about the lead’s behavior and the rep can make another call to convert this opportunity to a deal and close it.

Having interconnected teams is beneficial for any business, especially when those teams are as crucial as marketing and sales. To achieve this, use an automation system that will sync with both the teams and allow them to move important information around. Don’t let the “marketing” in “marketing automation” fool you. If tweaked properly, it can be quite useful to a sales team as well.