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We’ve talked quite a bit about marketing automation platforms and why they’re so popular with marketing teams. After all, marketing automation features can:

• automate much of your repetitive marketing tasks like scheduling social media
• streamline your marketing team operations workflow, and 
• help you improve ROI through email marketing A/B testing and landing page forms, just to name a few.

But what about your sales teams? Nowadays, marketing and sales teams are working more closely to ensure that marketing campaigns ultimately lead to revenue generation.  As a matter of fact, aligning sales and marketing could lead to over 200% more revenue from marketing.

As an agile, digital marketing agency ourselves, we know this quite well. So today, we’re going to share with you 7 brilliant ways your sales team can use marketing automation software functionality to their advantage. 

Let’s get right to it!

How Can a Sales Team Use Marketing Automation Software?

1. Provide Follow Up Customer Data for Sales

As part of an effective marketing strategy, marketing automation tools like Hubspot, Marketo, Sharpspring, and Pardot collect details on a prospect as customer relationships are built through content marketing and other channels.

This information can be shared with your sales team to personalize touchpoints and effectively increase the conversion rate. These details, collected and tracked through a lead’s engagement with your company, can be easily transferred to an integrated sales automation platform or CRM like Salesforce.

2. Track Your Lead’s Steps

In step one, we discussed collecting details on prospects based on the communication channels they interact with. The way marketers know which channels a lead has interacted on is determined by marketing automation. 

Whether they are engaging with your social media profile, searching for relevant keywords and phrases related to your content, attending your webinars, or any other means- your marketing automation software will track and record this information through tracking links, digital ads, predictive content, and more.

Doing this helps you to tailor your messaging and create more of the type of content your leads are interested in engaging with in real-time. Ultimately, all of these engagement metrics can be utilized by the sales team to improve conversions and shorten the sales cycle.

3. Act on Qualified Leads Faster with Lead Scoring

One of the most sales-worthy features of marketing automation tools is lead scoring. With, you can automate the process of determining how qualified a prospect who comes through a lead generation channel is to become a paying customer. 

With lead scoring, salespeople can be sure that inbound new leads obtained through various marketing departments are ready for the sales funnel and increase sales productivity overall by avoiding time wasted on unqualified leads.

So, how does it work?

Marketing automation systems assign a number of points for each qualifying action a lead takes, once the lead acquires a certain number of points, they are then ready for the sales process. 

Actions might include visiting a page, filling out a form, attending a webinar, scheduling a phone call, or opting in to an email campaign.

Alternatively, if the lead meets certain demographic criteria, they may be assigned a default lead score if their specifics meet your ideal persona criteria which help to shorten the sales lifecycle by bypassing the qualification process and sending the lead straight to the sales team.

4. Keep Leads Engaged Through Automated Email

What about the time period between when a lead is acquired and when it becomes qualified for sales? 

Without a marketing automation platform, it might just sit there and become stale, but with the proper tools, you can keep your leads engaged through automated lead nurturing email campaigns or emails that are triggered based on the actions they take. 

Automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages. Better yet, triggered emails generate over 75% of email revenue as opposed to one-size-fits-all campaigns.

For example, let’s say you have a lead interested in a particular sales asset like an e-book or a white paper. You can set your marketing automation tool up to opt a lead into a sales campaign. 

This email, or sequence of emails, will further nurture and educate them through relevant messaging that will keep them engaged until they become qualified, through lead scoring, to begin the sales cycle. 

5. Measure Performance and Improve ROI

Finally, sales teams can utilize marketing automation to track the performance of any campaigns and messaging being used by the marketing team. Marketers today know they need to be tracking their marketing funnel return to understand whether their effort was worth the return, and if not, adjust quickly.

Ideally, you want to see a 5x ROI, or in other words, your bottom line should be 5 times what it cost to run your marketing campaign in the first place. Knowing what performs well and what doesn’t can only benefit sales as they attempt to bring potential customers across the finish line. 

Get Your Sales Team Aligned With Marketing Automation

Marketing automation isn’t just for marketing teams, it can help sales to win more deals, improve their operations, and shorten the sales cycle. 

However, we understand that it can be difficult to get your sales and marketing teams to align, particularly if your business and employees are not used to this strategy. 

In addition to our digital marketing efforts, we also offer sales enablement and support for startups and enterprises so that both organizations can be in sync and ultimately earn more revenue for your business.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can support your sales team’s adoption of marketing automation tools, reach out today and we’d be glad to discuss how we help businesses do this in a way that meets their specific growth goals.

Topics: B2B Marketing, Digital Marketing, Marketing Automation, Sales Enablement