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Sales is hard. There are, however, great tools out there to make it far easier and more successful. At MO we write a lot about how the roles of sales and marketing need to be more integrated.
For improved sales enablement, marketing needs to ask sales about common objections they receive in the field, the quality of the leads that marketing is generating, and which leads are closing. Tighter integration here means better quality leads from marketing, shorter sales cycles and increased sales numbers.
Sales & Marketing Automation is a tool that marketers are starting to embrace, and equally many of the Marketing Automation and CRM software vendors have recognised the need for an integrated sales and marketing approach. What has emerged is a set of Marketing Automation tools which are more geared towards the sales professional than the marketing professional. Progressive thinkers in the field have pegged the term - sales automation.
7 ways to use Marketing Automation to improve your sales performance:
1. Automate follow-up
Never let a prospect slip through the cracks again. Use ready built sequences to email prospects now and in the future with a set of emails. Let's say your prospect is interested in buying apples, you can enrol a prospect in an email sequence that delivers five personalised emails over two months. Each mail is already built and has valuable attachments added. All you need to do is find your prospect in the CRM and click 'enroll'. Have another prospect that is looking for pears? You have an email sequence for pears as a well! The emails are sent from your email inbox in Gmail or Outlook, and the prospect thinks they come directly from you!
2. Email tracking
Ever sent a piece of valuable information or a proposal to prospect and wondered if they have even opened it up? With sales automation, you have the option to select to be notified when your email is opened. You'll also be notified if the email is forwarded and opened by someone else. These notifications can be instantly delivered to your mobile device or laptop.
3. Email templates
If you have emails that you send regularly, these can be templated. These regular emails include follow-ups, quotes, requests for meetings, and breakup emails. Yes, breakup emails! We've found one of the most successful emails that always gets a response from an unresponsive prospect is a breakup email. You've been following up with a client for a week with no response. Choose the breakup email template that lets him know you think he is no longer interested and are going to close his file. You'll be surprised how quickly he emails you back!
4. Documents
All regularly used documents can be stored and accessed directly from your email. All sales professionals have documents they send regularly to prospects including company profiles, product datasheets and case studies to name a few. These documents are maintained centrally, so you'll never be concerned that you might be sending an out of date document.
5. Meeting scheduling
We've all gone back and forth with a prospect when trying to find a suitable time to meet. Sales automation software provides a link to the prospect that lets them view your available time slots and book a suitable time to meet with you. The scheduling tool automatically works around your already scheduled meetings. Book a meeting with me here.
6. Website revisits
If a prospect that you've sent a quote to comes back to your website, wouldn't you like to know? That is exactly what Marketing Automation does, notifying the salesperson on their laptop or mobile device. Automation will also store a history of all the pages the prospect visited.
7. Adding contacts to CRM
One of the fears of all sales professionals when they hear the word CRM is hours and hours of logging data into the CRM. Sales automation does all this automatically. Emailing a new prospect, tick the 'Add to CRM' checkbox and all the prospect information is automatically saved to the CRM.
With sales automation, your sales will grow and your days will become more productive. MO Agency uses HubSpot Sales to deliver sales automation, and our marketing team uses HubSpot Marketing, so we have first hand experience of how these tools can improve sales performance.
Download our ebook "Sales Enablement: How we used CRM and automation to improve our sales performance" by clicking on the link below.
