How to Leverage Marketing Automation to Support Your Sales Team


When most businesses think about marketing automation, they tend to focus on—you guessed it—marketing. They’ll use marketing automation to send welcome series, lead generation campaigns, emails for conferences, newsletters, etc. And, that makes sense. Marketing automation is a great way to create personal and relevant marketing experiences for your customers and potential buyers.

However, one of the often overlooked marketing automation strategies is sales enablement. As I’ve mentioned before, when marketing and sales work together, businesses thrive. But, what role does marketing automation play in that effort?

How to Leverage Marketing Automation to Support Your Sales Team

Here are two simple advantages every marketing automation platform provides your sales team:

  1. Equipping your sales team with insights on any activity from the account. Marketing automation allows you to track everything from email opens to how long someone watched a webinar. This is valuable information for sales representatives when they’re following up with a potential lead. But, in many cases, looking for insights beyond the individual prospect they’re following up with can make a tremendous difference. Finding out what other people within the account are also downloading can provide sales members with a more comprehensive view into all of the potential challenges the organization is facing.
  2. Sending sales emails on behalf of your sales team. There are a couple of benefits for leveraging marketing automation to send emails on behalf of your sales team. First, these emails are tracked. This helps your sales team actually know who is opening your email, who is acting on it, and who isn’t interested. Another advantage is that it gives both marketing and sales the ability to test and see which type of subject lines, messages, and calls-to-action are most effective for converting new business.

Marketing automation isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s a sales tool. However, in order for it to truly work, you need to make sure your marketing and sales teams are completely aligned. Taking the time to discover how you can leverage marketing automation to support sales will not only make your sales teams more efficient, it will ultimately help them be more effective.

3 Leading Indicators Your Marketing Is (or Isn’t) Working

papers and coffee
There are a lot of different marketing metrics you can use to measure success. However, many businesses don’t pay attention to whether or not their marketing is working until sales numbers are slipping. And, by that point, it’s too late. Because a lot of marketing is about generating leads and peaking the interest of potential customers, it’s the tip of the spear for your business development efforts. The question is, how can you measure whether or not your marketing is working before it’s too late? 3 Leading Indicators Your Marketing Is (or Isn’t) Working Here are three ways you can determine if your marketing is effectively supporting your business objectives before you’re in desperation mode:
  1. Your messaging isn’t resonating with people. As a marketer, it’s important to know what messaging works and what doesn’t. If the content you’re creating (eBooks, infographics, blog posts, etc.) isn’t resonating with potential customers, they won’t consider you as someone who can help them solve their problems. Paying attention to which messages resonate (and which don’t) will help you create content that actually leads people towards the path of becoming a customer.
  2. Your sales team is spending a lot of time clarifying your unique value proposition. If your sales team is having to spend a lot of time explaining how you are uniquely positioned to help potential customers solve their problems, it might be a sign your marketing isn’t doing a great job of answering those questions. In a world where potential customers are already halfway through the buying process before they engage with an actual human being, it’s important that your marketing is effectively communicating what you do and how you can help.
  3. You’re generating a lot of low-quality leads. Your marketing efforts should be focused quality over quantity when it comes to lead generation. If you’re generating a bunch of leads that don’t fit the profile of someone who buys, you’re creating a fan base, not a customer base. This is why it’s important to define the exact buyer personas you’re trying to reach.
Whether you’re a business leader, sales professional, or marketing director, I know you’ve got a lot on your plate. However, if you can embed these three indicators into your thinking, it will help you keep a pulse on your marketing efforts before it’s too late.

One of the Easiest (and Most Effective) Ways Marketing Can Support Sales

notes on email marketing


As the buying process has evolved, the clear-cut lines between sales and marketing have started to blur. Potential customers are significantly further along in the sales process before they ever connect with a salesperson. In the same way, marketing plays an important role in the sales process by equipping the sales team with tools to support and accelerate the sales process.

While there are a variety of ways in which marketing can become a strategic asset for business development, one tactic is so easy that it can often get overlooked.

One of the most valuable things your marketing team can do to support sales is to create email templates your business development team can copy, paste, and customize for conversations with prospective customers.

3 Sales Templates Marketing Can Help Write

If you’re interested in equipping your team with pre-written email templates, here are three you should consider:

  1. Emails for Sharing Lead Generation Resources. You spend a lot of time and energy creating lead generation resources or hosting webinars for your sales team. But they’re incredibly busy, too. Most days, they don’t have time to read the entire resource, summarize it, and craft an email to share it with current or prospective customers. One of the easiest ways to maximize the reach you get from your lead generation resources and webinars is to also craft email templates your sales team can copy to quickly share it with their contacts.
  2. New Products or Solution Announcements. As a marketer, you’re at the center of knowing about the direction your company is going. Whether it’s a new product or important announcement from your leadership team, having a few templates in the sales team’s back pocket provides flexibility and helps them stay on top of communicating the latest and greatest information to customers and prospects.
  3. Answers to Common Challenges and Pain Points. Your sales team is constantly communicating with people about how your business can help solve their greatest challenges. As someone in the marketing seat, you have a perspective into all of the various pain points and challenges they hear. You also have the ability to constantly test and tweak messaging to see what resonates most. Based on what you find, you can easily create sales email templates built around common challenges and pain points with the messaging you’ve found to resonate most.  

Creating email templates your sales team can customize not only saves them a great deal of time, it also allows your marketing team to control the messaging. This means potential customers are getting the same message about your brand, products, and services, regardless of who they might be engaging.

4 Inbound Lead Nurturing Tips Every Biz Dev Pro Should Know

Tree growing and turning into an arrow shaped tree flying off


Inbound marketing has become the most effective way for businesses to generate leads in today’s digital age. However, there’s one essential element required to maximize the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts — lead nurturing.

Creating an effective campaign means thinking beyond generating a lead and considering what happens after someone submits their information to download your inbound marketing resource.

This is where lead nurturing comes in. Lead nurturing will help you qualify and develop the leads your campaign generates, moving them from early-stage leads to interested prospects who are a good fit for your product or service.

4 Inbound Lead Nurturing Tips Every Biz Dev Pro Should Know

But what’s the key to effective lead nurturing? Here are four tips you should know:

  1. (Pre)segmenting the leads you’ll generate.

Before you start writing emails and setting up your nurturing flows, first think about who the leads are you are likely to generate and how you should follow up with them. It’s possible that one nurturing track and one set of messages will work for
 all of the leads your campaign generates, but it’s more likely that you can segment those leads and nurture them in more targeted ways.

For example, if your business caters primarily to two specific industries, you may want to nurture each industry’s leads in different ways and with different content.

  1. Defining your goals and creating email content.

With your segments in mind, you are now ready to start writing the email content for your nurturing flows.

When deciding what kind of content you’ll use, it’s helpful to ask yourself what your ultimate goal is for each segment you plan to nurture. If your high level goal is to turn early leads into sales ready leads, what does that mean in practical terms? Do you have different goals for different segments? Once you’ve determined the goal for each nurturing flow, start mapping out your emails and your content.

  1. Nurturing through your website.

You’ve got your emails written and your automation flows in place. That’s great! But nurturing your leads shouldn’t stop at the inbox. Your leads are likely coming and going from many different parts of your website all the time. Maybe they directly type in your web address to get to your homepage or click a link on social media and end up back on your blog. Depending on the tools you use, you may be able to deliver targeted messages to these leads too.

  1. Determine when leads are ready for your sales team.

The machinery of your campaign is almost fully set up! To take things the final mile, give some thought to when and how you’ll pass leads to your sales team. How this process takes place varies widely from company to company. If you get a few leads, you may walk over to your sales folks and have a face to face discussion about each lead that comes in. If you get a large volume, it’s helpful to have an ongoing process in place.