Ideally, your sales team and your marketing team are working in concert, relaying information and supporting each other to increase business and drive revenue. If this is not the case, it most certainly is a goal. Using a marketing automation platform can help achieve that goal and make everyone even more effective.
Let’s explore some of the different aspects of marketing automation that make it such a powerful tool to help both the marketing and sales teams grow your business.
Lead nurturing
If you’ve ever used lead nurturing effectively, then you already know a bit about why it’s so important. Lead nurturing helps boost sales with potential clients who have long term needs. The marketing team can provide the collateral and touch points for your nurturing campaign in your marketing automation software. Marketing automation helps the sales team track and manage those leads at various stages until the sale is closed. While quick, short term sales are great, you can generate many long term relationships and repeat business through lead nurturing.
Outbound marketing
The process of outbound marketing triggers from a customer action. This leads to emails being generated and sent with whatever you want – from more product information to an invitation to a webinar or podcast generated by the marketing team. Marketing automation tools use outbound marketing to follow up on and categorize inbound marketing sales leads. Once you categorize leads through a marketing automation platform, you can be nurturing them individually through email follow ups to coax them, or pique their interest before they talk to a sales team member.
Specialized ad campaigns
You can think of marketing automation as a marketing butler. This butler is there to individually serve your leads by distributing various campaign elements prepared by the marketing team that are designed to generate more referrals.
For example, you can send campaigns out to existing customers in the form of a survey and email referral requests to those who respond positively. You can also send out ad campaigns to those who have expressed interest and have entered basic contact information on your site. Either way, the marketing automation platform sends the right message at the right time based on user behavior. This, in turn, produces higher quality leads for the sales team.
Improved productivity
Marketing automation makes the sales team more productive, almost automatically. Instead of wasting time on cold leads, the sales team gets quality leads who are ready to make a purchase. Your marketing automation tool creates lists based on email responses from your site, and can analyze your site’s activity to generate a list of quality, ready-to-buy leads. Your marketing team can also gain insights into what messaging is resonating with leads and use that information to prepare better campaigns.
Collaboration done right
Marketing automation will help both your sales and marketing teams be more effective. When these two teams are in sync, businesses grow. So, gather members of both teams and sign up for a free demo of SharpSpring.
