Making your sales team the best it can be isn’t just a matter of using the right specialist recruitment agency to fill your available vacancies. Once you’ve put together the “perfect team”, you also need to make sure that you’re empowering them to do their job quickly, efficiently, and effectively. Part of this process will mean making sure that you give your staff access to the right resources for growth and training purposes, and it may mean updating your use of technology to ensure that you’re enjoying the benefits of “marketing automation” to build strong customer relationships.
Marketing automation can make life easier for your salespeople, while improving your company marketing power. Not only does it help your sales people understand who they should be following up with, and how they should be building customer relationships with your audience, but marketing automation can also allow you to align your brand experience for customers, in a world where CX comes first.
Marketing automation software manages, streamlines, automates, and measures, to give your sales team what they need for exceptional results. Here, we’re going to look at just some of the ways that automation methods can empower your sales staff.
1. Marketing Automation Delivers the Right Leads
Unsurprisingly, sales teams – regardless of their skills – can begin to feel frustrated when they spend hours every day, constantly emailing leads and contacting customers who are never going to buy. Imagine one of your top sales people cold-calling ten leads one morning. After hours of complex conversations, every one of those people turns your sales person down. When they finally come across someone who’s ready to make a purchase, the risk is their confidence has taken a dent or lost the patience to stay in the conversation long enough to close a sale.
Marketing automation helps to reduce the chances of sales representative burnout through a process known as “lead scoring”. Lead scoring helps marketers to weed cold leads out of the consumer funnel, and pass only the strongest potential customers to sales. That way, sales teams are more likely to remain effective and confident, all day long.
2. Marketing Automation Bridges the Sales/Marketing Gap
Customer experience is the single most important element in getting sales this year, according to Digital Marketing Trends. If you want to establish a great customer experience, then you need to make sure that you align sales and marketing, to give customers a more consistent journey from awareness to purchase.
Marketing automation helps to give marketers a better understanding of the activity of key customers, so that they can ship that information to sales. This will give sales teams an insight into the buyer journey, while giving marketing the ability to trust that their sales people will know what they should discuss when following up with customers at specific times. After a while, sales can also give marketing feedback on which campaigns deliver the most conversions.
Ultimately, automation helps marketing to become more efficient, while enabling sales to contribute to your growth strategy in a more significant manner.
3. Marketing Automation Creates Stronger Customer Relationships
With marketing automation, you gather more data about your ideal customers, so that both your marketing and sales teams can start to build stronger relationships with customers at all stages of their buying journey. For instance, if you discover that your customers hate cold-calling, you can use marketing automation and lead scoring to give your sales teams other ways of communicating with warm leads through social media and email.
With the use of “trigger based” actions that tell sales teams when they need to thank a customer for their purchase, follow up with an order, or answer questions that a user might have, you can begin to nurture your audience more effectively, which leads to stronger relationships from the get-go. Instead of dealing with the frustration of calling a lead that doesn’t want to be contacted via phone, your sales team can offer some relevant information through email, followed by a nurturing campaign that’s influenced by your marketing group.
4. Marketing Automation Prevents Lead Loss
Whether you’re running a start-up or a pre-established business, every company wants to earn more customers, and profits. The best way to improve your chances of acquiring, and retaining a good lead, is to make sure that you know how to personalise the services and products your business has to offer. Today’s customers are looking for a way to differentiate one company from another in a sea of competitors. If you want to stand out, then you need to give more than a one-size-fits-all experience.
In a world that runs on personalisation, marketing automation can help you to gather the information you need to prepare your sales executives for complicated conversations. When marketers start to segment audiences through marketing automation, they can give sales teams guidelines to follow when addressing different types of customer. This could help to boost your chances of bigger sales, and better brand affinity from your customers. After all, everyone loves a tailor-made experience.
Marketing Automation: It Works for Sales Teams Too!
Though it might be called “marketing” automation, the truth is that this strategy is just as valuable for your sales team. By helping your sales experts to know exactly who they need to talk to, what they need to talk about, and how they need to contact the right people at the right times, you can improve the efficiency and comfort of your professionals.
Resource On Demand is Europe’s first specialist Salesforce Recruitment Company. We assist the world’s leading organisations to grow their technology teams. Supporting companies to fill roles that span across digital marketing, marketing automation, Human Capital Management, CRM system management and, Salesforce developer, Salesforce consultant and Salesforce admin jobs.
The team at Resource On Demand have access to an extensive database of key talent, registering over 8000 professionals each year. To find out how we can support you call us on +44 20 8123 7769 or rod@resourceondemand.com.