Think marketing automation is just for your marketing team? Think again.
The reality is that marketing automation plays multiple roles: the marketing team can use it as a tool to bring in leads, qualify them, and pass them on to sales, and the sales team can use it as a selling facilitator, providing reps with the sales intelligence they need to personalize their sales messages and reach out to prospects at the right time.
Ultimately, driving revenue is an effort that involves optimizing the sales funnel from start to finish — from a prospect’s initial touchpoint with a marketing campaign to the moment sales closes the deal. You read that correctly: converting leads into customers involves both marketing and sales, and marketing automation is the weapon of choice to make it happen.
That’s why we’ve created a new e-book, called 25 Marketing Automation Tips Straight from Sales, to better explain what our sales friends stand to gain from a marketing automation tool. Whether you’re a sales user trying to navigate the benefits of your new marketing automation platform — or a sales manager evaluating an automation tool for your team — this guide will provide the tips and best practices you need to be first into every deal, personalize every conversation, and improve overall productivity.
In fact, our own Pardot sales reps have had great success using marketing automation during the selling process — and they’ve teamed up with sales leaders across the B2B industry to offer a few tips that can help you find success as well.
From set-it-and-forget it nurturing messages to instantly identifying the best prospects, you’ll hear how sales teams make marketing automation work for them — and better understand how the different types of sales roles, including cold-callers, account executives, and sales managers can use marketing automation to crush their quotas. Download the full e-book to learn more about:
1. Turning cold calls into warm calls using detailed prospect activity reports
“I love getting real time alerts for people I spoke with months ago who said they weren’t ready to buy. It gives me the opportunity to strike while the iron is hot! I can engage with them when they are engaging with us.”
– Kelly Lacy, Account Executive, Salesforce
2. Putting a lead qualification system in place to help streamline your marketing and sales workflows
“Being able to use both a lead score and lead grade to differentiate how interested the prospect is in us versus how interested we are in the prospect is huge. Not only are we able to see that an individual prospect has a high score, but that they are also an excellent fit for our sales team.”
– Jeff Ostenson, Solution Engineer, Salesforce
3. Nurturing leads who aren’t ready to buy
“Sales needs to get into deals earlier — and it’s not through generic, unsolicited blast emails. You’ve got to be teaching, you have to be building trust through that educating process.”
– Jill Rowley, Evangelist and Startup Advisor, #SocialSelling
4. Personalizing every conversation right from the start
“Which mediums and platforms are for personal use, and which are for business? Sales reps are conducting business engagements, so they should be responding via business mediums. Don’t comment on your prospect’s Facebook status — instead, shoot them an email or reach out over Twitter. It’s all about mutual respect.”
– Mathew Sweezey, Product Evangelist, Salesforce
Get more tips from Pardot’s own sales reps by downloading the complete e-book below.
