MarketingAutomation.net

When you hear the term marketing automation, sales is not always what comes to mind, but when you learn more about the software it is easy to see that sales benefits just as much as marketing from the tool. The goal of marketing automation is to increase ROI. One way it does this is by offering many features that will really improve the efficiency of your sales team. I have come up with a list of the top 3 ways that marketing automation is used through sales to help your sales team get excited about this new software!

• Automated Sales Alerts – The system monitors all prospects and allows you to set automated alerts when someone takes action, for example if you want to be alerted every time someone searches for pricing you will be sent an alert automatically when someone searches for it.  Along with the alerts, the sales team will receive daily updates of any activity that a prospect has taken in the past 24 hours.
• Lead Scoring and Grading – This aspect of the system is something your sales team will find extremely useful. Instead of cold-calling and chasing after leads with no interest in your product, this feature allows the leads to come to your sales team prioritized in a list of those most likely to become opportunities. Lead scoring adds points for every activity the prospect does on your website. You are able to customize the amount of points and what activities will get points. For example, when they search pricing a lead may get 5 points, but just landing on your page would give them 1 point. This helps weed out people who accidentally came upon your site. Lead grading works along with lead scoring to triage leads, it gives your lead a grade based on how closely they fit the criteria of you ideal customer. Criteria used to grade a lead can be company size, location, industry, or anything else you feel is necessary to give a company a proper grade. Together they act as a great way to figure out which leads you need to follow up with first.
• Automated Lead Nurturing - This is a great way for your sales team to keep up with those leads that are not yet sales ready. Using drip nurturing programs, your sales team can reach out to these leads periodically so when they are ready to take that next step they remember your company. It is hard to keep up with leads that need to wait a little longer before making a decision, and this enables personalized e-mails to be sent without taking any time from the sales team.

Last time I spoke about how lead scoring works and how it helps triage leads.  This time I want to discuss another topic, lead grading, that works along with lead scoring to make work easier for both marketing and sales departments.

As previously stated, lead scoring is an automatic tool that scores a prospect based on their activity on your website.

Lead grading is another tool within the lead nurturing process that grades a customer based on how close they are to your ideal customer profile.  Lead grading is different from lead scoring because it is not based on activity, rather it is based on criteria.

Some examples of criteria used to grade a prospect include:

• industry
• location
• company size
• department
• job title

Other criteria can be added to the list as other standards for grading as well.

Lead grading can be automated, manual, or a combination of the two.  Prospect grades can be automatically programmed to increase or decrease based on any criteria.  Additionally, grades can be manually altered depending on the qualities of a lead.

Combined together in marketing automation these two tools make lead nurturing simple.  Both lead scoring and grading compose lead qualification, which is necessary to make the nurturing process straightforward for both marketing and sales.

Having only your potential customers search your website and inquire for more information is ideal, but the reality is that many others will stop by for a visit and a look around.  Even if you tailor your website to your target customer, many others will flock and join your list of prospects.  Although they may never become your customer, allowing visitors to consume your content can pay off.  Content can be passed along and shared with a prospect that is more your ideal candidate.

Since you have many visitors you may be thinking you have a lot of prospects for your sales team.  Really this just bogs down the sales reps with leads that are not worth their time and effort.  To make matters easier, marketing automation supports lead scoring.  With lead scoring technology you can eliminate the unfit prospects from your cycle before they clog the pipes to sales.

Lead scoring:

• assigns a point value to every action a prospect takes on your site

• prospects will then be given a score based on their activity, such as white papers downloaded, web pages browsed, or links clicked

After a prospect is scored the marketing team can view a prospect and assign them to sales according to score and other criteria.  By including lead scoring, a sales rep has an idea of the leads interest in the product.  Score can also be adjusted according to certain activities.  For example, if a visitor clicks on the career page within your website and then begins to search through your job postings, they probably are not looking to buy your product.  In this case, points can be subtracted from the leads score.

Lead scoring benefits your sales department and also shows your marketing department where prospects come from and how they interact within your site.