Many marketing managers see marketing automation as merely a time saving tool, however, in this blog post, you’ll discover how Marketing Automation converts your leads and sales on Autopilot!
Think of it this way, Marketing Automation (or a sales funnel) makes it possible to customize communication in a way that automatically touches every prospect with the right message at the right time.
This makes it ideal to support the sales cycle and automated growth within your business.
Here’s a look at how Marketing Automation converts your leads and sales on autopilot:
The most important strategic goals of a marketing automation strategy are:
• Increasing lead generation (61%)
• Lead nurturing (57%)
• Sales revenue (47%)
While a single sales rep may not be able to adapt to the multi-channel interaction of today’s sales funnel, a well-designed marketing automation platform absolutely can!
Companies using marketing automation and sales funnel nurturing to engage their audience are:
• 60% more likely to regularly repurpose content
• 2 times more likely to capture intelligence for the sales team
• 230% more likely to customize content to the Buyer Journey stages
• 5 times more likely to use intelligent targeting to trigger content
Marketing automation offers sales and marketing departments key insights into how their audience is behaving online.
These insights can make a big difference in the content creation process. Automatically delivering tailored social media, email and blog content to your audience will help convert qualified leads into sales.
Related Resource(s): 5 “Little-Known” Secrets to Automate Your Leads & Sales in a Single Weekend…with ZERO Technical Skill!
The Tools Needed to Engage in the New Sales Funnel
Sales reps cannot just sit back and let “marketing” present them with prospects…
By creating audience engaging content and feeding it into your marketing automation platform, you can automatically begin generating leads & sales.
Some platforms include Click Funnels, Infusionsoft and Marketo to name a few.
This tools are insanely easy to use and navigate. They usually have customized webpage builders that utilize a drag & drop system.
Depending on your goals, you could have a fully automated platform in as little as an hour!
It’s like fishing…
The marketing automation platforms (sales funnels) are a HUGE net catching as many of your IDEAL leads as possible, 24/7/365.
Social sellers who use marketing automation report a 63.4% annual increase in their company’s sales revenue versus non-social sellers who reported 41.2%.
Simply, those who use marketing automation see 20% more growth than those who don’t…
AND those who don’t have to work much harder to achieve that 41.2%!
Sales and marketing need to work together by utilizing tools such as marketing automation platforms if they expect to create an automated sales experience for their prospects.
Related Resource(s): 5 “Little-Known” Secrets to Automate Your Leads & Sales in a Single Weekend…with ZERO Technical Skill!
“But what is a sales funnel,” you ask
Sales funnels are used for narrowing, sorting, analyzing and following up with sales leads.
Most companies chase after sales leads without doing anything to sort or evaluate their leads along the way.
Without a sales funnel, your sales team is flying blind.
Having a sales funnel in place allows you to…
- Visibly and consistently process necessary information to get the best results out of your sales leads.
- And it helps you measure your progress at each stage of the sales process.
A Marketing Automation system is an absolute necessity to ensure that your company is taking a regimented, methodical, well-organized approach to building relationships with customers and closing more deals.
Sort and Rank Sales Leads
These systems are responsible for taking your entire audience and automatically generating serious leads…
Not just people looking for free stuff!
The process could be based on which leads are most likely to buy, which leads have the most urgent “pain points” that are driving them to make a purchase decision, and which leads require longer-term lead nurturing and follow-up before they are ready to buy.
Not all sales leads are created equal. Some people are going to be a great fit for what you sell and are going to be ready to start the sales process right away. Others, however, are going to be a poor fit or are going to require a longer-term conversation to build trust and create a good business relationship.
Related Resource(s): 5 “Little-Known” Secrets to Automate Your Leads & Sales in a Single Weekend…with ZERO Technical Skill!
Focusing on the Right Leads
Creating a sales funnel also gives you greater focus. It also allows you to devote time and resources to working with the right sales leads, instead of spreading yourself too thin chasing bad leads.
If you have a few preliminary steps in your sales funnel, such as “initial e-mail survey” or “initial phone screening,” or “request to do an online demo/presentation,” this gives you the chance to ask the customer to commit to a higher level of interaction.
Every step of the interaction and conversation along the way gives you the chance to learn more about your prospective customers, and figure out which customers are serious buyers, and which ones are not yet ready to commit.
Put a Longer-term Process in Place for Lead Nurturing
Especially in complex major account B2B sales, it can take up to a year before a new client is ready to convert and close the deal.
This is why it’s especially important to have a sales funnel with multiple points of contact over time. You might need to keep “nurturing” and educate your sales leads (by following up and having multiple conversations) over many weeks or months before they’re ready to buy.
By identifying your sales leads behavior, you can design a longer-term process to keep talking to your sales leads in an orderly, thoughtful, organized fashion, and keep getting your sales message in front of the customer to keep answering questions and building trust.
Having an optimized sales funnel is crucially important for success in today’s competitive B2B (or even B2C) sales industry.
This is all a part of how Marketing Automation converts your leads and sales on autopilot. It’s like an automatic perpetual customer generation system.
Whatever you sell, you’ll be able to sell more of it by using an organized sales funnel with multiple points of contact, building relationships along the way.
Would you like to learn more about marketing automation, digital marketing, and behavioral sales funnels? Register for our most popular FREE training webinar now, here!
