As a sales outsourcing company we are now quickly becoming sales marketing automation outsourcing specialists as well.  As an outsourced sales company we have a unique perspective how marketing automation helps sales because we specialize in leveraging content marketing to engage prospects as much as we use marketing automation to generate and nurture leads.  And by engage we mean helping to convince your buyer to buy from your company. Isn’t more sales what sales and marketing automation outsourcing be about.   This blog addresses the top 10 advantages of putting sales and marketing automation tools in your sales reps hands (if you have never seen an Marketing Automation Software here is a quick link to 5 minute demo so the points below make a ton more sense).

How Does Marketing Automation Outsourcing Help Increase Sales Reps Production?

 

Lead scoring: For companies that are lucky enough to have a steady stream of leads marketing automation prioritizes where your sales reps should invest their time. Marketing automation tools uses realtime scoring to see who is most engaged.  With this point system, you are no longer need to guess “where to start”.

 

Your buyer tells your rep what they are interested in:  Marketing automation identifies what content your buyer is most interested in.   Essentially giving your rep night vision goggles into your buyers interests and concerns.

 

Help your sales champion to champion.  A sales rep can be sold by their prospect.  You, as the rep have a hot one on the line and feels it is going great, then utilizing a Marketing Automation tool, you can see if you prospect is actually opening your emails, clicking on the content you are sending and going to your site.  If the content is not engaging or not being shared, you can raise that as an issue and ask “how can we improve our performance to make it easier for you to sell”. We find that the prospects that transact, typically engage with at least 12 pieces of content.  If a prospect is not engaging, chances are they are not serious about buying.

 

Saves time and provides feedback to your reps: email templates programmed in the Marketing Automation Tool can be measured in their effectiveness (essentially you can now do in the micro what you do with your bulk email blasts)  if emails are not working you know.   Streamlining great emails that work keep follows up simple and keeps your rep on the phone.

 

Save more time by automating follow up emails:  Using drip campaigns set up by marketing “from” the rep allows the reps to stay engaged with non- active prospects.  No more worrying about wasting time and precious phone time on cool prospects.  We never know when a cool lead will now be ready to buy and drips ensure prospects will think of you when that time arrives and they are ready to engage.

 

Quick access to all past communications:   with the streamlined integration between a marketing automation software (we use Pardot) and your CRM, all the rep needs to do is use their Outlook Pardot connector and all their email history will automatically be entered into Pardot and Salesforce.  This keeps updating the CRM simple.

 

Reduced headcount –  With marketing automation, reps can now “work”  more prospects, requiring less reps and more time for reps to work on closing deals, not nurturing non-ready to buy leads.

 

Prevents lead and deal leakage:  Typically sales reps will abandon leads if not ready to buy within a given time period (depends on the sales cycle- could be a month, a quarter).  Reps need to work closest to the dollar.  To close those deals on the horizon requires nurturing,  most reps do not have the time to do this even with the best of intentions.  They  are incentivized to close this quarter.   Marketing automation lets them close this quarter and continue to build a healthy pipe for next quarter. Marketing Automation cures that sickness.

 

Model the top performers:   Automation and CRM tools allow a view into top performers secrets of success  What leads do they pursue? What scoring attributes commonly lead to a sale? How do they engage prospects? When do they engage prospects? Periodic and systematic analysis of rep performance relative to the attributes and activities that are captured by demand generation tools and CRM can provide invaluable insights for struggling reps.

 

Call at the right time:  A lead deck  is a live feed that is part of the tool that notifies your rep the minute your prospects are active on your site.  When your prospects have your company top of mind, and your buyer is sitting at their desk (or on their PDA checking you out)  your rep has it’s a great time to pick up the phone or hit them with an email.

 

To see a quick demo of a Marketing Automation Outsourcing Tool Click Here.  To see if we can accelerate your B2B demand generation with better and faster technology integration  and getting your sales team up to speed please feel free to reach out for a quick conversation and we will let you know if we can help.   We guarantee what we are sharing here is simply the tip of the iceberg.