The Sales Cycle Is Changing
Many companies and salespeople are becoming frustrated as they become the administrative arm of their new CRM system. They end up chasing unqualified leads generated by a poorly run online lead generation system. Some of these changes are:
- Much of the buyer’s research is done online before you ever know they are a qualified lead
- Buyers put much more emphasis on what’s said by peers (often in social media) than they do on what your advertising message says
- Before marketing automation tools, these early researching steps had been invisible to most companies and salespeople
- Informed, qualified buyers know exactly what they are looking for
Marketing Automation
With a marketing automation system in place sales teams can contact only qualified leads making it easier for them to make sales.
- Improved conversion rate for leads to sales
- Reduced sales cycle by reducing the prospects research time frame and reaching trust in your solution sooner
- Increased productivity of your marketing staff (generating and nurturing leads) and your sales staff (closing deals)
- Reduced costs by taking the manual effort out of lead follow-up for over 90% of the tasks in a manual campaign
- Real time insight into which marketing efforts are providing ROI and creating sales
- Flexibility to make your team more responsive to market changes and new communication tools
- Deep intelligence into what works, what doesn’t, and why. Future marketing campaigns are constantly improved
- Personalization of your marketing efforts so that each prospect gets information tailored to their exact interest, just when they are looking for it
Here’s an example of how this can work
Marketing automation is achieved by using a software tool set to perform these basic functions in your lead generation and sales system. A great automation tool will do these things for you:
- Manage multi-channel campaigns like email, SEO, SEM, and Social Media so they are fully integrated for lead generation
- Integrate with your CRM tool and email marketing system for seamless data integration and minimal administration from your marketing and sales teams
- Detailed yet easily understood analytics for business insight into your campaigns
- Easy to use business rules for your lead follow-up, automated through the use of email
- Scoring of leads as they work through their research phase until they are “fully qualified” when a salesperson is alerted into action
- Lead Nurturing features based on time sequences, lead action, or scoring rules
- Anonymous website visitor data mining, identify website visits and behavior for every action on your site
- Landing pages and forms are created for making actions happen
- Lead scoring and prioritization
- View detailed prospect information in CRM with no manual data entry required
The Results
Case studies have shown dramatic improvements for companies using marketing automation, as reported by DemandGen.com:
150%
Increase in bid to win ratio for projects
181%
Improvement in average close rates
400%
Increase in conversion rates with lead scoring
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