“One of the things that’s always amazed me is that regardless of your available resources, things never slow down. I know that I am busier today than I was when I was a [marketing] team of one.”
– Laura Horton, Senior Manager of Marketing Communications at Pardot
In the ever-changing world of B2B sales and marketing, there never seems to be enough time. Of course, marketing automation is a serious time-saver — but as marketers, we can always do more to streamline our processes and enable our sales teams to sell more efficiently.
One way to do this is by integrating your marketing automation platform with time-saving connectors and plug-ins. Let’s take a look at three essential connectors that can enhance your marketing automation strategy.
1. A tool for quickly following up with prospects via phone
According to the Harvard Business Review, companies that reach out to potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision-makers as firms that reach out even an hour later.
Imagine this scenario: Marcus, a software sales rep, is on the train headed to work when his phone rings. It’s an automated alert telling him that one of his hottest prospects has filled out a demo request form. He could wait to respond until he gets to the office and wraps up his morning meetings — or he could follow up immediately via phone and wow his prospective clients.
Pardot connects with Twilio, a service that allows you to do just that. Learn more about Pardot’s Twilio Connector here.
2. A data cleaning service
According to Ascend2, 38% of marketers cite inadequate contact data quality as a top barrier to marketing automation success. If you struggle with getting a complete view of your prospects and customers, your best bet is to connect a data cleaning service with your marketing automation platform.
Pardot connects with Data.com Clean, a service that helps keep your database up-to-date by automatically matching, appending, and enriching your prospect records.
Watch this one-minute video to learn the benefits of combining Data.com Clean with Salesforce and Pardot:
Learn more about the Data.com Connector in the Pardot Knowledge Base.
3. Customer support chat
If you use a chat service like Olark to provide customer service and sales support on your website, you should definitely connect it to your marketing automation platform. Integration will allow you to create prospects directly from your chats, view chat activities in prospect records, and even score prospects’ chats to aid in lead qualification.
Let’s say Julia, a college student, is writing a research paper about your industry. She spends an hour visiting dozens of pages on your website and downloading multiple e-books. At a glance, she seems like a hot prospect because her lead score is through the roof — but because you integrated your website support chat with your marketing automation platform, you’re able to see something you normally wouldn’t: Julia chatted in to explain her research paper and ask for clarification on a few product features. You can use this information to save your sales team from pursuing a dead-end lead. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can assign genuine hot prospects to sales reps based on positive chat interactions.
Click here to learn more about Pardot’s Olark connector.
Learn more about marketing automation connectors and plug-ins.
We’ve explored three ways to save your sales and marketing teams time and money by integrating your marketing automation platform with other useful tools. For more information about the various plug-ins and add-ons we offer at Pardot, check out our Knowledge Base.
What tools do you use to enhance your marketing and sales processes? Let us know in the comments!