Leads lost due to late action, the marketing team not understanding why you're not meeting sales goals, and your salespeople applying their own process. Does this sound familiar to you and would you like to know what actions your team needs to take to optimize the sales process? Does marketing automation enhance the customer journey? We say a resounding yes! Read here what marketing automation can do for your business!
Marketing Automation is the automation of sales and marketing processes with the right message at the right time, fully personalized.
Every visitor has a different need. In marketing automation software, you can easily follow the steps of the visitor. This allows you to see in which phase of the customer journey the visitors are and when they drop out - on an individual level! With the insights gained, it is easier to adjust your marketing activities accordingly. You can guide visitors to the right phase of the customer journey, track how long it takes for them to get to the next phase, and notify your sales team when certain visitors have reached a goal.
Optimal cooperation between Sales and Marketing department
A good collaboration between marketing and sales is essential to generate quality leads for your organization, it is important to define a buyer persona, map the customer journey and determine at what points in this customer journey marketing and sales should perform an action to guide a lead through the marketing and sales funnel. The marketing department "warms up" the leads until the lead is ready to be transferred to the sales department. Who in turn encourage the leads to make a purchase. Marketing automation ensures that your marketing and sales strategy are automated.
The software retrieves the information from the website, finds the most engaged contacts and automates the marketing. Here we explain three key metrics we get from marketing automation:
Site tracking allows you to follow your visitors, giving you insight into every step of the customer journey. This way you can offer them what they are looking for at the right time and prevent them from leaving your website again. By seeing what products, services and/or information your visitors are interested in, you can contact them in time before they get distracted. You can send an automated follow-up email with information about the products/services they viewed on your website.
With marketing automation, you gain insight into visitor behavior on your Web site. You can see exactly when someone logs in, what someone clicks on or what someone orders. For all these actions, a visitor is awarded points, this is called Lead scoring. The more points, the hotter the lead is. When a Lead has enough points, the marketing team hands them over to the sales team, the lead is then ready to proceed to a purchase.
Abandonment cart means that the visitor leaves the cart before the purchase is completed. Through the insight you have created into your visitors, you can restore this purchase. This can be done through automated emails that give the visitor a reminder.
We will now take a closer look at a well-known marketing automation software: SharpSpring. Other useful marketing tools you must have as a B2B marketer can be found here read more.
SharpSpring Sales Optimizer automates the sales process. It provides an automated pipeline, in which tasks and actions can be created. By using this pipeline, salespeople provide the best customer journey for conversion. These tools give you control over the quality of sales communication.
In the visual workflow builder, you can design your ideal sales process. In it, you can specify which steps your team should take. Think from developing opportunities to closing a sale. Here, the sales team and the marketing team can both use the same automation tools, in which leads are further guided to the final sale.
Workflows allow you to automate actions in addition to transferring tasks. For example, developing an opportunity and moving a deal to a new pipeline stage. This automated action ensures that any gaps that exist are filled. In addition, it keeps leads engaged without you having to do anything for them. This allows the team to focus more on actually bringing in clients instead of spending their time on administration.
In addition to assigning actions in your workflow, you can also apply details, this makes it complete. For example, for an action you can define which emails (this is the most important online channel for companies) and media your sales employee sends. For each assigned sales task, you can link email templates to be sent. You can add content items relevant to the phase of the customer journey the lead is in. This way, it's easy to align sales communications with the marketing team's content strategy. You have control over the message to be conveyed to the leads.
Personal contact, of course, still lies with the seller. The salesperson still has room to put their own spin on this. From the task management, the salesperson has the option to send a Smart Mail or to customize it for a particular lead via the e-mail editor.
One-on-one engagement is very important, but it can also be dangerous. Manual phone and mail tasks provide room for making mistakes, such as missing a follow-up mail. In this way, you can miss opportunities for a sale. Sales Optimizer makes sure you don't miss out on leads and opportunities. You can manage this by giving your own schedule to follow-ups.
In each vendor's task manager, you can automatically generate follow-ups automatically. For example, when a Lead is on your site, this will show up at the top and your team can contact them immediately while your organization is still on top of mind with the lead.
In the Activity Feed, you can very easily specify who to contact. This provides instant insight into which leads have automated tasks. Lead owners can thus immediately see who is currently of interest so they can be followed up. When a lead opens an email, this is shown in the Activity Feed and highlights when the lead owner has a follow-up task. The sales process can thus be properly aligned with the stages in the customer journey.
It is important to get your team on the right track so that everything is streamlined. You can do this through reports that have details of the sales process. Here you can see which automated tasks need to be completed or rescheduled during a certain period of time.
To check that everything is going according to plan, you can verify that salespeople sent their emails when you assigned it and that the results of the automated tasks are all on track.
In short, with SharpSpring Sales Optimizer you can make designing, implementing and refining your sales process easier and more effective.
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