For anyone involved in selling B2B products and services today, marketing automation is just one tool that helps convert prospects to sales and helps to facilitate more personal relationships with buyers if used to its fullest potential.
However, it’s not always easy for the sales rep to view automation as positively as peers. In their eyes, it might be that nothing can replace the face-to-face conversation with a prospective customer, with real human interaction driving the buyer journey towards purchase.
The main point to consider here is that the timing of face-to-face conversations between buyer and seller start later in the process these days. Prospective buyers have been shown to be nearly two-thirds of their way down the journey to purchase before they engage the help of a sales rep. We are not replacing face-to-face and human interaction, just focusing this effort on where it delivers the most value – the sharp end.
It just means that more conversations take place at later stages and require slightly different props to help balance the scales against the modern buyer’s world, which is where marketing automation comes in.
Here are 5 ways sales enablement can be fuelled from marketing automation.
1. Greater insight
Marketing automation gives you the information on a prospect’s digital body language that helps you to map precisely where they are in their journey towards purchase, and what exactly is of interest to them. So when pre-agreed lead scoring matrices show a warm lead to be ready for handover to sales, they come complete with online behaviour, with what they’ve viewed, downloaded and interacted with. It’s a great help in letting sales know exactly what the prospect spent doing in the first 67% of their buyer journey. They can then start the conversation at an appropriate level of engagement, taking details, tailoring information and addressing specific subject areas known to be of interest.
2. Improved visibility
From a sales perspective, the new paradigm enables you to keep tabs on your customers. You can monitor their interest through visibility of their actions, taking action at pre-ordained points in the buyer journey. When a warm lead you have previously spoken to returns to the site, clicks on an email and downloads a document, then it’s easy to continue the conversation given the additional interest shown.
3. Automated personal touches, less manual input
Workloads become easier to manage and communications become more effective and less time-consuming. You can take care of your warmest prospects via automated responses to given actions, making the process more efficient and customised down to the individual and their perceived needs. These communications can come directly from the sales manager, yet require zero touch and effort from them.
4. Prioritising opportunities
Working this way, you make the best use of the time available by only following up really hot prospects, leaving aside visitors to your site who have simply filled in a form.
Far from being an anonymous process that undermines the importance of personal relationships, marketing automation opens up new, more rewarding ways of talking to customers. Focus can be on their explicit business needs and how you can meet them, increasing both your credibility as a facilitator in the buyer journey and, at the end of the day, your value to your organisation.
5. Improved programmes
The other great benefit of the marketing automation approach is that it makes results of action transparent, enabling you to adapt or tweak messaging based on response and feedback. Is there an area in which prospects never convert to sales, the upstream messaging is misleading, and is it apparent which behaviours lead to a conversion? Do more of what worked, and less of what didn’t, saving money and streamlining processes at the same time.
Whilst sales may view a new platform as less desirable than a bigger sales force, it’s actually a tool that helps sales close down more leads, with better insight and opportunities and less manual effort. It’s a tool that enables sales to have more telling, rich and advanced conversations than ever before. Your sales force is better armed to convert and spends more time talking to people who are ready to buy.
Why wouldn’t a salesman or sales manager want his life made easier in this way?
