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:
- 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.
- 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.