Business Growth With Marketing Automation And Sales Enablement
When it comes to an exhaustive list of repetitive tasks that the marketing team has to perform, marketing automation comes as one of the best solutions. It makes your marketing easy besides saving your time that could be utilised for other important tasks in hand, helps you streamline and prioritise your marketing efforts, and makes your marketing team more efficient. On the buyer’s front, marketing automation personalises the online experience of the visitors with your website, thereby giving them the right information at the right time and helping you bag more leads. In fact, automation has increased qualified lead generation by approximately 451% and sales productivity by 14.5% with a reduction in marketing overhead by 12.2%. Also, businesses that automate lead management have been found to get 10% or more bump in revenue in just 6-9 months time.
On the other hand, the sales team works on the data produced, brings in new leads, and transfers them for nurturing right after their first sign of engagement. All this is a humongous task that needs relevant data to be collected and reported and the content to be optimised and personalised in a buyer’s final stages of conversion through ebooks, demos, case studies, testimonials, and more. And that's where sales enablement comes into the picture. However, the technical skills of sales reps may need some polishing for them to use the sales enablement software. They might sound like two different software with different functions but they’re more interdependent than they appear to be. According to Marketo, 67% of companies get better at closing with their marketing and sales aligned.
So, let’s get deeper into how these two solutions work.
Primary Uses for Sales and Marketing Teams
Sales enablement is used in account-based marketing wherein tracking the performance and conversion of target accounts can be measured and sales goals could be set. You can track the activities logged by salespeople, the number of demos delivered for different products, scoring leads to know whether they qualify as ideal and their numbers generated. Sales enablement solutions also come of great use when one needs to review the sales process and identify the areas where improvement is needed.
Sales enablement is used in account-based marketing wherein tracking the performance and conversion of target accounts can be measured and sales goals could be set. You can track the activities logged by salespeople, the number of demos delivered for different products, scoring leads to know whether they qualify as ideal and their numbers generated. Sales enablement solutions also come of great use when one needs to review the sales process and identify the areas where improvement is needed.
Did We Say They Are Interdependent?
Once the sales enablement solution finds the right lead to be nurtured, marketing automation works to engage the leads by optimising and personalising the content that they see or read. This is a continuous process. Once a lead is ready to buy, it is transferred back to the sales team. Finally, the sales enablement solution helps in creating content that can be used to increase sales at the final stages of the buyers' journeys. It utilises every ounce of the data available using CRM and segregates what is relevant and helps in the growth of the company.
Tracking Messages and Emails
When marketing automation and sales enablement work interdependently, it gets easier to continue building the relationship with the ideal prospect or lead. Sales enablement brings in new relations and marketing automation can build that relationship stronger over a period of time. When you buy a marketing automation software, all the emails and messages are sent through the provider’s network. However, when it comes to sales enablement, these text messages and emails are sent through the company’s own domain (Google, Office 365, Exchange, etc), thus giving them better control and authority.
Both solutions have advantages at various stages of marketing and sales strategies. Sales enablement can track those emails that the company receives replies of and with marketing automation, it’s very easy to track the number of clicks and opens. Based on this, leads that are not ideal can be removed from the funnel by the sales enablement solutions. Therefore, marketing automation can quickly get into action and start building relationships with the leads generated, saving your time when both the solutions are optimally used together.
Filling the Funnel With the Right Target Audience
Marketing automation and sales enablement are utilised for different levels of the marketing funnel and at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Sales enablement takes care of filing the top of the funnel by driving in new leads and marketing automation works at the middle and lower levels of the funnel where only those leads are nurtured that are qualified as per the company’s definition of an ideal customer. Therefore, both these solutions give a better picture of the lead view and there is a smooth transition of leads between them. Furthermore, sales enablement easily removes the targets from the list who have started engaging, which are then transferred for further action through marketing automation.
Overcoming the Challenges
When one looks at the marketing and sales team performance, the most commonly faced problems is lead-view. The marketing team generates leads and hands them over to the sales team. But what happens to their leads once this transition has taken place is kind of a blurry picture to the marketers. Similarly, the sales team doesn’t usually have an in-depth knowledge of the content that the prospects have seen, the products or services they have looked at, and their preferences. When both the solutions are aligned, these challenges can turn into opportunities for better lead attraction and customer engagement.
The Right Alignment of Sales and Marketing For Business Growth
Like we said, when the marketing automation and sales enablement solutions are aligned, the two teams have more information about the buyer’s complete journey and the lead or deal loss is lesser. According to HubSpot, this alignment can generate an average of 20% more revenue per year. On the other hand, those with misalignment lose 4% of it per year. Hence, these two solutions with the respective teams have to collaborate through the entire journey of a buyer to prevent losing out on even a single prospective customer.
Quick Refresher
The buyers today have clarity of what exactly they want and have several other options to meet their needs. For your company to stand out and provide the best services, the indulgence of marketing automation and sales enablement solutions is necessary. This way, your strategy becomes comprehensive as you track the entire activity of leads and both the teams do not overlap the content or send anything irrelevant. More lead generation gives more numbers to be nurtured, more nurtured leads convert more, and the ROI generated by both the teams would exceed the past records.
The two solutions have a huge role play and it works best when they both have the information on everything that is fed to the leads. It is a holistic approach that most successful businesses have utilised to give their users the best experience with your website. And that's where the right alignment of not only the marketing automation and sales enablement solutions are necessary, but also of the sales and marketing teams.
How do you achieve that?
Come and join us at our biggest Marketing Automation Summit 2019, co-hosted by HubSpot and get all the answers directly from the HubSpot MD and Head of Channel Sales, HubSpot Asia!
