Sales automation software is a huge blessing but unfortunately, it’s a tool that few salespeople leverage. Most of us are too busy learning what marketing is, sending one-off emails and chatting with clients but little do we realize that if they took the time to understand what marketing automation does, we would not have spent nearly as much time looking for leads.
So, below we’ve put together a list of ways to use a marketing automation platform to help you close more deals. (You can thank us later).
1. Provide Timely Feedback
Just like a new employee, the marketing automation software needs to learn what’s good and what isn’t before it becomes a truly productive member of the company. Without feedback, it’s going to assume that most leads passed on to reps are good until proven otherwise. To speed up the learning process, provide some feedback. Here's a story to how that lead got to you, and odds are, your marketing automation software can identify what was unique about it and find more high quality leads for you and your sales team.
2. Find Out Who Visit Your Website
Your marketing automation system is already tracking the people you want to talk to. All anonymous visitors who land on your website become “anonymous leads.” The system finds out their location and company and tracks their behaviors until they fill out a form which allows you to learn more about them. Go after those people! Either look them up if your marketing automation system has a sales insight tool or ask for a list from your marketing department and search for interesting company names.
3. Automate Your Prospecting Emails
At one time it made sense to keep Excel spreadsheets with dates and times for when you emailed people so that you knew when to follow up. Modern sales reps automate that entire follow-up process so all they do is send the first email and let marketing automation follow up with targeted, personalized, sales-oriented emails every four or five days. For every email you send, it’s like sending five. At this rate, you can reach hundreds of prospects every hour. It handles the follow-up, knows not to send on weekends, and inserts fields like “first name” or “company” for you.
4. Pay Attention to Key Details
If your marketing team has regularly scheduled email sends, and those emails are set to reply back to the lead’s owner (aka you), you’ll receive the “out of office” replies from all of the recipients. Save these! They’re often full of contact information that you would have never gotten otherwise. It's guaranteed to be a working number, unlike what you get from data providers, and it also tells you when they’ll be back in the office so you know when to pick things up and have a topic of conversation.
5. Pursue Tactical Marketing
This is the black belt level of sales and marketing alignment. When it comes down to it, everyone is being measured on complementary metrics: more marketing leads mean more sales leads, and if you can provide insights that the marketing team might not have because they aren’t talking to prospects every day, you, too, can help generate more demand. Savvy sales reps recognize a good thing when they see it and it’s all about working smarter, not harder.