6 Steps to Make Marketing Automation Sales’ Secret Weapon

It’s a common misconception that marketing automation is only for marketers and that sales will be left with yet another system to learn how to use. This couldn’t be further from the truth – in fact, it only takes a few hours for sales reps to learn everything they need to know to get the most out of an automation system. Let’s take a look at how marketing automation can improve the workflow between marketing and sales.

1. Get Updates on all Prospects

A sales rep’s day normally begins with a review of active prospects. Which prospects were active most recently? Which need more immediate follow-up? With marketing automation, reps can have an email delivered to their inbox every morning with a list of all their assigned prospects who were active within the past 24 hours.

2. Prioritize your Hottest Leads

Use Lead scoring and grading to prioritize your time. Combined, a lead score and grade can objectively qualify leads so that only high-quality leads are getting passed from marketing to sales. By looking at a lead’s score and grade, sales reps can quickly identify which leads are ready for immediate follow-up, and which are not.

Research shows that 35%-50% of sales opportunities go to the vendor that responds first.

3. Avoid Cold Calls Forever

With marketing automation, prospect activity data is constantly being collected and imported into your system – so you always have access to the most relevant actionable information. Use the behavioral data to prepare for all of your sales calls, then tailor your conversions to your prospects’ needs and interest based on what you know.

4. Stay Updated on Prospect Activities

As your day progress, you’ll want to stay as up-to-date on your prospect activities as possible. Prospect tracking makes it possible for sales reps to stay informed on their prospect’s movements, even during meetings and those well-deserved lunch breaks. Get real-time notifications delivered to your email, CRM or desktop application – and always know when your prospects are active on your site.

61% of all B2B marketers send leads directly to sales. However, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. -MarketingSherpa

5. Nurture Tomorrow’s Leads.

You don’t want to waste large portions of your day following up with leads who aren’t ready to buy. Fortunately, with marketing automation, you don’t have to. Instead of letting these leads slip through the cracks, your marketing team can set up lead nurturing campaigns to automatically nurture leads through the sales process. By providing content to prospects over time, your company will stay top of mind, reducing the risk that prospects will be scooped up by competition.

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate more 50% sales-ready leads at 33% of lower cost -Foresster Research

5. Track your Efforts

At the end of the day, your marketing team wants to see what’s working and what’s not, so that they can continue to deliver highly-qualified leads to sales. That’s where the closed-loop reporting functionality of marketing automation comes into play. With the ability to map closed deals to the campaigns that created them, your marketing team will always know which channels bring in the best leads.

They can also use features like lifecycle reporting to gauge the health of your sales funnel, allowing them to see opportunities in the pipeline and the length of time that leads are spending in each stage of the sales cycle. With this information, marketers can adjust and improve their strategies so they’re bringing in the most qualified leads possible, maximize speed through the pipelines.