Marketing automation gives sales effectiveness a boost

Although sales teams may think an online marketing system is best left to their marketer colleagues, revenue performance can improve with marketing automation. Since marketing automation simplifies tasks and streamlines processes, sales teams can benefit from the use of these tools.

The typical day of a salesperson involves a wide variety of tasks. Representatives may have hundreds of prospects to keep track of and hours of research to conduct. Marketing automation can act as a personal assistant to monitor lead activity and deliver alerts and reports, according to an infographic from Salesforce.

How marketing automation enables sales effectiveness

Marketing automation is more than just a platform that can send emails to prospects. It can streamline sales teams’ workflows and help representatives better organize their days to achieve better effectiveness. Sales reps can receive automated reports every morning so they know what is going on with their leads and which prospects have interacted with materials. Features like lead scoring and nurturing allow salespeople to follow up with the best leads, which allows the team to never make cold calls. Since this can be a difficult and time-consuming part of any sales professional’s job, marketing automation eliminates this by directing reps to the most relevant prospects. Many of these platforms integrate with customer relationship management systems to make prospect tracking more efficient. In fact, since most sales reps are very familiar with their CRM platforms, this can make marketing automation easier to use for sales.

More importantly, marketing automation allows sales professionals to build relationships with leads before they are ready to commit to a purchase without being distracted from hot prospects. Automated nurturing programs send messages to leads while the sales team focuses on people who are ready to negotiate a deal. Additionally, marketing automation platforms offer lifecycle reporting tools so reps can understand the sales funnel. This helps sales teams improve their processes for maximum efficiency.

Marketing automation saves times and boosts effectiveness

While many organizations see marketing automation platforms as exclusively a marketing tool, sales teams need to be on board with the solution the organization chooses, Business 2 Community stated. The platform needs to be aligned with what the sales team does.

The marketing and sales teams need to collaborate to establish what makes a high-quality lead so the process can be closely tied to demand generation.

Sales teams are involved in a large amount of processes each day, and if representatives get bogged down with time-consuming tasks, they may be missing the opportunity to generate revenue. Analysis of the marketing-sales funnel can help both teams identify areas where processes are not at maximum efficiency so improvements can be made. This can help sales reps avoid getting slowed down in their normal processes.

Sales teams need tools that allow them to capture maximum efficiency since they are responsible for driving revenue gains in the organization. Marketing automation can drive sales effectiveness and streamline processes.