How Marketing Automation Helps Sales and Marketing Alignment

Marketing automation is an exceptional tool that can help your sales and marketing teams communicate better with your prospects, leads, and acquired customers. When a user visits your website, it makes it easy to acquire information to help you understand them. Once you know them, it’s easy to create dynamic content marketing, landing pages and email campaigns that help convert leads to sales.

Effective use of a marketing automation platform is not just the marketing department's responsibility. When it comes to planning and creating workflows, both your sales and marketing teams should be onboard guiding your strategy. Without the two working together, you will miss opportunities to enrich your sales funnel, include key marketing processes and core marketing tasks. 

Sales' alignment will help create a more rounded customer experience and improve your customer acquisition. In this post, we will cover how your sales team specifically can benefit from turning to this marketing automation software:

• How can automatic notifications improve my sales team response time?

• How will logged calls and emails help my sales team create better relationships with our leads and customers?

• Can our sales process and follow up procedures benefit from a marketing automation platform?

• Will pre-written email templates help my sales team stay in line with our marketing communication strategy?

• Will SharpSpring's meetings scheduler help improve our customer acquisition? 

• Can campaign attributions help my sales team better understand where our marketing leads are coming from online?

Automatic Notifications

Marketing automation allows you to build workflows that send notifications when a lead carries out particular actions. These workflows are completely customisable to your organisation. More often than not, notifications are used to alert a member of your sales team that a lead needs their attention. 

Depending on your marketing strategy, you can decide when the salesperson should follow up with a lead or customer. Examples include when:

• A visitor submits a form.

• A lead visits a specific page on your website. For example, a product or service information page.

• A lead completes a specific call-to-action from an email. 

• A lead score increases or decreases.

These automatic notifications help your sales team know exactly when a lead is interacting with your organisation and at what point on the customer journey. It's important to reach out to leads as soon as possible; otherwise, they may visit a competitor and decide to do business with them instead. 

Another benefit of automatic notifications for your sales team is the ability to improve your relationship marketing strategy. On SharpSpring, our marketing automation platform, a new feature on LinkedIn flags contacts in the CRM when they switch jobs.

You can create a workflow that sends the account handler a notification to update their records when their contact's job changes on LinkedIn. This update could then trigger another workflow, sending an automated email to congratulate the contact on their new role and inviting them to stay in touch.

This helps your company stay top of mind as they transition into their new role and opens the door to new opportunities. It also allows your team to continue nurturing a relationship even as the contact moves from company to company.

Keep Track of All Lead Interactions

Many systems have a way to keep track of contacts and leads. SharpSpring offers a unique feature named the Life of the Lead. It exists within the automation software's contact manager. 

The Life of the Lead is a visual timeline of every interaction your organisation has ever had with a specific contact. On the Life of the Lead, you can see on which dates actions were completed. You will be able to see form submissions, email opens, web page visits, and more.

Web page visits not only shows your marketing team what is interesting to your audience. Sales teams can also gain valuable insight into how ready a prospect is to convert, depending on the pages they've been visiting.

You can also see the length of time a visitor has been on a page. This can help you determine if they are simply skimming your site or taking the time to read the details. Visitors spending substantial amounts of time on product information pages, for example, could be closer to a purchase decision. 

In addition, your sales team has the ability to log every call and email they have with leads and contacts. When your sales team logs a call, they can specify if it was ingoing or outgoing. They can also record if they spoke to the contact or left a voicemail. Further, they can leave notes for themselves and your entire team that cover what was discussed. 

When you set up accounts for your sales team, you can decide if you want to enable MailSync. This allows every salesperson's email to be connected to their account. Emails between sales and the contact will be displayed in the Life of the Lead. This allows continuity between team members as they can read exactly what was said. 

Sales Pipeline Follow Up Procedures

When asked about the best benefits of marketing automation, marketing and sales teams say they are:

• saving time

• increasing lead generation

• improving customer retention

• shortening the sales cycle.

Your customer acquisition strategy can be greatly improved by adding marketing automation software, like SharpSpring.

The sales pipeline feature of the program can be customised to your organisation. If you have multiple product lines, you can build multiple pipelines. Each stage of every pipeline is fully adjustable.

If your sales team already has specific follow up procedures, they can be built into your pipeline editor. If you do not currently have procedures in place, you can specify the number of emails and/or calls at each stage of the pipeline. This can help your customer acquisition rates and improve your communications planning. 

You can determine the effectiveness of your pipeline by observing how many leads move on to the next stage of the customer journey. Marketing automation systems like SharpSpring truly provide an end-to-end ROI of your relationship marketing strategy. 

SmartMail: Pre-Written Emails

Consistent and on-brand communications are an important facet of sales and marketing alignment. When marketing has worked hard to nurture a lead and qualify them, it ensures your sales team stays on message to convert the sale. Your communication planning team can take advantage of a unique feature in our marketing automation software. SmartMail allows administrators to create pre-written emails for your entire sales team. 

With consistent messaging, you can expect your sales team to curate a better customer experience and help maintain high customer retention. Better still, your sales team will be able to focus on customer acquisition without having to put time into writing emails. They can take your beautifully crafted words and add any necessary attachments such as quotes, literature, and other sales material. 

Meeting Scheduler

Your sales team is constantly juggling in-person meetings, online webinars, and phone calls. To continue providing a positive customer experience, it's important to be on-time for every meeting and call. With the SharpSpring meetings scheduler, your entire organisation can easily keep track of their meetings and availability.

There is nothing worse than double booking because you or someone else made a mistake. With a meeting scheduler, you can keep all of your appointment information in a single calendar. You can also create automatic workflow notifications to remind everyone involved that they have an upcoming meeting. The meeting scheduler can help your communications planning team keep everyone on track.

Campaign Attributions

Another incredibly useful aspect of marketing automation is the ability to track and monitor marketing campaigns. SharpSpring can be used to track activity related to specific social media, email, or other marketing campaigns using UTM codes. Knowing how many visitors and quality leads are associated with specific campaigns helps your sales and marketing team understand where their efforts are most effective.

SharpSpring provides you with end-to-end ROI on your campaigns. This can help you understand which parts of your marketing communication strategy are most effective and profitable. You can then adjust your marketing strategy to help your organisation scale to new heights. 

Nurture Leads More Effectively

With marketing automation, your sales and marketing alignment will improve. By seeing what works and what doesn't work, you can ensure you provide a positive customer experience. 

As your sales team uses our marketing automation platform, they can expect to close more deals because of:

• automatic notifications,

• a detailed timeline of customer interactions,

• pre-written emails,

• a meeting scheduler,

• and campaign attributions.

Contact us today to schedule a demo to learn more about how your sales team can close more deals using SharpSpring