Sales Automation and Its Role in a Holistic Marketing Strategy

Sales Automation is quickly becoming the most important tool for SMB (small to mid-sized) B2B businesses, but why?

Sales and Marketing misalignment is the big black hole your hot leads are falling into, with 50% of marketing leads being ignored by sales reps and 79% of marketing leads never converting into sales. If you’re a business owner or of managerial level these stats should shake you to your core. 

From the very first touch point until a sale has been closed, every stage of a customer journey needs to be tracked and nurtured, ensuring the customer is given the right messaging and content at the right time. But with both teams being overwhelmed with daily tasks how do you as a business provide this level of personalization to your customers? 

The answer is simple, Marketing and Sales Automation.  

Sales Automation is an emerging technology that complements the more commonly adopted Marketing Automation. To preface this, automation in the fields of marketing and sales is more than just robots writing blogs. Intelligent automation tracks and nurtures a customer throughout their journey, using triggers such as email responses and forms to guide them along a personalized journey. 

Myth: Automation is a less personalized way of communicating with customers 

This is incorrect. Marketing and Sales Automation allows teams to nurture their customer throughout their customer journey using triggers which respond to specific criteria in-house teams have built into the tool. These criteria could be a prospect’s job, industry or engagement with a piece of content.  

Marketing Automation vs Sales Automation 

Both Marketing and Sales Automation react to triggers and nurture a lead, but the key difference is the level of personalization the lead experiences.  

Marketing Automation works on the idea of a one-to-many approach. There is less known about the lead and so a broader range of content and strategies are used to target and nurture the lead. This approach is much more implicit and subtle, whereas Sales Automation is explicit and follows a one –to-one approach.  

Sales Automation aligns greater with the concept of lead scoring whereby a leads job role, industry and even their buying intent could be known, allowing the sales rep to provide a higher level of personalization and content which is specifically targeted to guide a lead through their customer journey. 

Marketing and Sales Unified 

Both Marketing and Sales Automation track a lead at each stage ensuring that not one single lead disappears into a black hole during handover or through miscommunication. This level of alignment provides a smooth buyer journey and ensures your internal teams are not pointing the finger at each other at the end of every quarter.  

In a real world setting, unity allows for Marketing to use automation to clearly see which content pieces garner the highest levels of traction and send related follow up emails and/or offers, notify customers on company or news updates using SMS, collect accurate data through webforms and more. While Sales reps can use automation to send emails (from their personal addresses instead of a generalized company address) starting customers along a personalized journey that automatically sequences sales activities, such as setting reminders to review a lead, schedule a phone call, send meeting requests and so on.

The fluidity and high level of intelligence in Sales Automation tools means your reps, who are usually busy engaging with customers, can handle more leads more effectively, maximizing the quality of your customer journeys.

For owners, managers and C-level executives within a business, a more unified approach, removing a lot of the stress and frustrations when managing each team and maximizes your leads, especially in the post-COVID era of a digital-first approach.  

This holistic strategy of unifying Sales and Marketing through automation provides a higher level of clarity with each stage, trigger and content piece documented, meaning you can clearly see which touchpoints and content pieces work, and which simply don’t.  

Less of your company’s time is wasted on chasing leads as automated campaigns do all the work for you, allowing more time to be spent on creating new, innovative content that gets your customers and potential leads excited. 

The future of Sales and Marketing is a holistic one. The impact of COVID on buyer habits has undoubtedly further accelerated a digital-first approach. This coupled with the ever-growing need for personalization in an increasingly competitive landscape means that companies must adopt a unified approach. Sales and Marketing unification through automation provides business with the ability to target and nurture potential leads at every stage of the customer journey using tools that both Sales and Marketing have access to and can view, removing any potential miscommunication on which leads are coming in and their quality.