You are probably familiar with the typical implementation of marketing automation. You may be part of the 19% of B2B marketing companies that use these tools, and if so, you may even be among the elite (37% of the group) that use personalisation, which is at the core of today's marketing automation.

Typically, marketing automation is used to automate steps in the process that help convert website visitors into contacts, nurture them and then hand them over to the sales team. Contact forms, workflows, automated emails and activity tracking are used to convert visitors into leads.

In advanced cases, information is collected directly (through feedback), indirectly (through the IP address) and inferred (for example, through the time visitors spent viewing and reading certain content) to optimise the user experience.

Just like simple personalisation, smart content allows you to customise each web page and email experience to match the buyer persona, the current stage in the buyer journey and the interests of the individual. Essentially, each attribute can be used to customise the visitor's experience to their needs. Once this is done, the branching logic of the automation can be customised to match the buyer's preferences exactly.

A well thought-out marketing automation strategy enables seamless collaboration between marketing and sales.

With marketing automation for business growth

The creators and early promoters of marketing automation were tech-savvy companies. Their employees were naturally used to multiscreening and naturally had access to cloud data, as well as being adept at digging into social media profiles and other online resources.
So when a lead reached a certain sales stage, the responsible sales representative not only had access to the lead's history, behavioural data and insights, but also "dug" through a number of details and integrated them into the sales approach. Needless to say, sales reps were more effective when they were able to utilise the groundwork of their colleagues.
Now marketing automation is becoming attractive to the next generation. Those are usually marketing people who see marketing automation as a way to improve their lead generation.  However, the information so painstakingly gathered by marketing is rarely passed on to sales.
As I said, in many companies, the sales people to whom the leads are passed either do not have access to the data collected or are not trained to use it effectively. So very often a hard-won lead is lost through a clumsy contact by sales.

A report from Docurated on the state of sales enablement shows us that in the most common case, salespeople don't even know where to find the right content to close a deal, but only think about this step of finding the data when they need to.
This challenge has been recognised and the problem of linking the sales & marketing camps has been worked on. SLAs in between help enormously. Measurable success was discovered in the companies that had tech savvy people in the sales team doing the conversion of leads. However, this is a relatively small subset of B2B companies.

Effective work thanks to marketing automation

Marketing automation has the potential to help where the traditional marketing department reaches its limits. Doing so will not only demonstrably improve your results, but also improve the direction of your sales & marketing.
This probably sounds like a rosy, implausible scenario to you now. Let's now look in detail at how you can make it work. To do this, we need to start with a premise - if every sales person has access to the cumulative results of marketing, they are much more effective.
We know that in some cases they are resistant and in others they simply don't have the time or inclination to consider these marketing insights. This is where marketing automation can be the prompter that gives your sales employee the right information about the lead to be processed.

What should you do?

• Move these insights to the lead in the sales notification.
• Offer context-related suggestions.
• Erweitern Sie den Prozess zu einem Vertriebs-Kanal, wenn es angemessen ist.

These are all capabilities of the marketing automation tool you are using or considering. However, the devil is always in the detail and your product/service, market, target buyer or sales person could affect how you can utilise the tool.

To help you realise what's possible, we've put together a list of 25 points to help you unlock the full potential of your tool:

Include the following information in the push-up message to your distributor:

• Which search term was used to find the lead (if the keywords are unknown, use the words for which the page ranks)
• Which buyer persona the lead could belong to.
• Which buyer journey this might follow.
• Which product pages the lead has visited.
• A list of the content that the lead has read/downloaded.
  
  

Provide the following insights:

• Based on the buyer persona and journey, remind your employee which questions the lead could still be struggling with
• Provide a list of common decision criteria for this persona.
• Explain which step of the buyer's journey the lead is currently in and what the next steps could be. How long could it take before the lead is ready to buy something?
• Show which business case is most likely to be attractive for the lead.
• Identify the buyer roles that are involved in the process based on the journey.

Provide the following to help your sales representatives:

• Email templates that are suitable for a buyer at this stage of the journey.
• Case studies, webinars and e-books that match the persona and the stage of the buyer's journey.
• A list of questions to help sales make decisions.
• What steps are expected next to enable the salesperson to get a series of "yes's".

Engage sales management with these approaches:

• Forward the key details to the sales manager (company, personas, journey stage, company size and product) so that they can provide excellent tips.
• Provide more details about the company.
• Notify Sales Management when unread/clicked messages appear.

Keep the salesperson engaged:

• Unlike standard page visit alerts, set specific alerts for key behaviours (visiting a pricing page, multiple visits over a short period of time)
• When there is new content that matches a buyer journey, ask an employee to share it with the appropriate lead.

Do you have any questions about marketing automation? Get in touch with us! We will be happy to help you.