In the B2B market, the cycle deal can last for months or even years. Therefore, each client is weight in gold, and competitors never sleep. In this case, emotions do not influence customers behavior. Therefore the faster you start working with the lead after the first touch, the better.
The marketing department should never think in terms of, “now I will generate a bunch of leads, and let those sales guys have fun on their own.” Marketers’ job is to help them building beneficial interaction with the client at all stages of the customer journey.
In an ideal world, there is an experienced Sales Director in each company. He builds the interaction between marketing and sales so that everything works like a Swiss watch. But in real life, this is not always the case. Much depends on the company’s technology level, the industry, the specialists’ availability in the region, competition and many other factors. However, this is not a reason to surrender and not even try to make sales and marketing like each other.
In this article, I want to tell you about the benefits of marketing automation, as well as briefly describe 9 particular tools that help Sales Managers closing deals.
Marketing automation is a technology, universal for any business. Online or offline, B2C or B2B, selling digital or physical goods — you can automate any kind of business. Further, you will learn how to use automation for cutting costs on the wage fund, for example – performing bulk email validation for free with Proofy.io. And even better news ― using the promo-code R18HE27T35P1 you can get 35% (!) discount for our services.
Many companies already use CRM-systems and free email validation and automation services, but face challenges:
- The same content and the offer for the entire customer base causes extremely low open rates.
- Weak or even absent leads segmentation, as a result — managers do not know who to call first.
- No way to track the interest and involvement of the specific client to make a personal offer.
The marketing automation lies in a fact that specialized software segments the lead base by the degree of involvement, and then sends the corresponding trigger email campaign with personalized offers.
1. Lead scoring (By Proofy.io)
Lead scoring is an automatic assessment of the quantity and the quality of the customer’s actions on the website. By the number of points, you can track the degree of client’s involvement and identify customers inclined to purchase.
You can create a convenient assessment system for you and your employees.
For example one opened letter — 1 point, visited website — 2 points, re-visited page — 5 points. As a result, when a potential client gains the required number of points, you know about the degree of his interest and make him an offer he can’t refuse.
2. Site tracking
Site tracking is monitoring the customers’ actions on your website. With this knowledge, you can comprehend the interests of each specific website visitor, and also to segment your database for even more personalized offers.
Thus when you know how many times the customer visited each specific page, you can plan an email campaign with the content that will hit the target. For example, your visitor opened a particular product page 2-5 times on your site – we send him a letter where he can read the other clients’ reviews. If the same customer visited the page more than five times – your Sales Manager receives a notification to pay attention to this client and contact him. Thereby your managers never make cold calls and know exactly what to discuss with the customer.
Using the mail settings on the principle of “opened — not opened email” and “clicked – not clicked on the link” will not only further increase the open rate, but also build a logical chain in the customer’s mind. That is, the next message will be automatically sent only if the lead has opened the previous one. In this way, you will be able to keep the sequence of delivering thoughts you want to address to your client through the content.
3. Retargeting
Retargeting implies the use of a potential customers database for showing them ads through various social and advertising networks. You can offer them special buying terms, inform about the fact that the item will be out of stock soon (if it’s true), show the content which compares yours and the competitors’ product highlighting your advantages, etc. You can set up retargeting ads in your personal area of advertising platform (e. g. Facebook Ads Manager), or directly in the CRM system.
4. Chat-bots
In fact, the scheme is the same as in the email campaigns. The point is in reminding about yourself and motivate the client to make an intermediate target action — download a useful content or get an appointment for a consultation.
5. Lead generation systems for partners
If your company trades through partners or dealers, in most cases, you can effectively form a leads stream in different regions. You can implement a system to forward applications to partners without giving them full customers’ contact information. All calls you can fix in the system. Thus you’ll be able to see how the dealers process leads to motivate the ineffective ones and encourage the effective ones. We used the same system in our own project Proofy.io.
6. Proposal software
There are tools for Sales Managers to send commercial offers faster and monitor whether customers read them or not. And marketers can help them making offers for different audiences and develop materials for presentations.
7. Complex sales & marketing automation systems
There are various automation systems — such as Hubspot or Salesforce. They allow you tracking almost all customers’ interactions with your company on the Internet and offline, automate the communication and much other useful stuff.
Conclusion
They are not cheap, but performing free email validation and everything else automatically – maybe you have grown enough for such a system? If not, you can use specific tools for bulk email verification e.g. Proofy.io.
We can continue this list but giving you an exhaustive list of tools and features was not the purpose of this article. The challenge was to encourage you thinking about the need for tight integration of marketing and sales in your company, and automating processes if you have not yet achieved this.
We wish you growth and prosperity!
