Many years ago the work of sales and advertising departments were separate entities. Advertising efforts were geared toward pushing out commercials, prints ads, and outdoor billboards. Sales agents spent countless hours dialing phones and trying to pitch their product to people at random.
Over time, businesses came to recognize the power of inbound marketing. By providing valuable online content that consumers want and need, they discovered customers would come to them, sort of like a magnet. Marketing and sales automation software brought the two departments together to facilitate a smoother operation.
Now sales no longer needed to spin their wheels with hours of “cold calls” because sales automation delivers “hot leads” instead. Just how does sales automation work? Here are four ways sales automation software jumpstarts your business.
Enhances your customer relationship management plan
How you interact with your prospects and customers is paramount to keeping a good reputation as a business, not to mention it increases your sales. With sales automation software, you won’t have to worry about forgetting to touch base with an important customer or following up with a hot lead. Through automation features, you will have red flag reminders to follow up or you can even set up an automated email campaign (more on that later).
Let’s think for a minute about how a potential customer would feel if they did reach out to a business for more information. Maybe they filled out the form or downloaded material you offered. Then no one contacts them right away. The ball is dropped for several weeks. Finally when someone does reach out to contact them, what was once a hot lead is probably ice cold! They may have gone to your competitors by now. A customer relationship management plan that utilizes sales and marketing automation features keeps the ball rolling.
Strengthens your lead generation
Automation software is also business intelligent. That is to say that it uses artificial intelligence features to help you get the best data about your leads. It gathers data about prospects and customers to provide you with an accurate profile of your lead. This is important if your marketing department is going to continue to produce great content. And it’s important to sales so they can connect better when they do call. According to HubSpot, lead enrichment tools “gather information from hundreds or thousands of data sources to give you an up-to-date, comprehensive profile of your prospect.”
Updates your contact list
You don’t need to pick up the phone or run down the hall to talk to someone in marketing about a prospect’s contact information. When leads download information or fill out a contact form through the marketing side of things, you can easily access this and generate your own contact list from it. In fact, you can simply set up your automation software to extract certain contacts based on the criteria you select. So, for example, if you want only those people who work in a certain industry or have a particular job title, then you simply set up your software that way and it will do the rest for you. Now, you have the contacts you need without typing a word or even calling anyone.
Implement your sales strategy
Sales automation helps you put into practice your email strategy – with ease. Emails will be automatically sent out to people you designate as leads. You can define the criteria that make them a lead, thus reducing even more steps. Using email templates that you tweak just a bit for a more personable feel will speed up the process. In addition, sales automation software allows you to begin an email campaign. That means your leads will receive a series of emails in a row but each one may be contingent upon how they respond to the previous email. So, for example, you send out email “A,” which has a link at the bottom. If the person clicks on the link, then they will receive email “B,” if they don’t click on the link they receive email “C.” This type of sales strategy has a personal touch to it but uses automation and intelligence features that save you valuable time.
If you are ready to see your business propel forward through sales and marketing automation, contact us today.