By automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time data and insights, sales and marketing automation tools can help teams work more efficiently to nurture and close more deals.
The key is to deliver the right content and data at the right time to nurture more leads through the funnel. And the more you can eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks, this frees up your sales team to focus on the highest-impact things they can do to build relationships and close more deals.
This post takes a closer look at the benefits of sales and marketing automation and actionable examples of automations you can implement today.
What is Sales And Marketing Automation?
Sales and marketing automation helps streamline and automate tedious or repetitive parts of the sales process, so you can free up your sales and marketing team to focus on the most strategic activities. This means a more efficient and productive process when executed well.
Sales automation tools can help across all marketing and sales aspects, from lead generation and nurture campaigns to CRM processes and reporting.
What Are The Benefits Of Sales And Marketing Automation?
With sales and marketing automation, you can identify, manage, and close more deals faster by doing the following:
- Increase SDR and AE productivity. From automating adding leads into your CRM to tedious data entry tasks, this frees up more of your sales reps’ time to focus on talking to prospects, building relationships, and closing deals instead of spending hours doing data entry in your CRM.
- Make sure your sales and marketing teams are aligned. Nothing kills momentum faster than when sales and marketing aren’t on the same page regarding who your ideal customer profile (ICP) is and how to share the right information at the right time.
- Get a holistic view of your sales pipeline. Spending hours running reports manually gets old fast. Automated tools can help you collect and analyze data, so you can make better decisions in less time.
- Generate more qualified leads. From prospecting to data enrichment and lead scoring, you can use these tools to get more qualified leads in your pipeline. Not to mention, with automated lead scoring, you can have salespeople engage with leads in the right way at the right time to increase the chance of closing deals.
8 Examples Of Sales And Marketing Automation At Work
There is no shortage of ways to leverage sales and marketing automation to generate more leads, improve the customer relationships and close more deals. Here are some examples you can use.
1. Follow-Up Messages
Most buyers don’t convert on the first message. In fact, the optimal number of follow-up messages is two to three.
And many sales professionals recommend following up six times.
You can use automation to remind you when to follow up, surface relevant information to include, and even help write the follow-up sequences using tools like ChatGPT.
While sending a “just checking in” email is better than no follow-up, it is a lazy, suboptimal approach. A better way to follow up is to deliver value, which depends on where the prospect is in the sales cycle.
So, if it is a stuck deal, you will want to identify and address bottlenecks and objections head-on in your follow-ups.
Or, if it is someone who is early in their research, you might want to send relevant, helpful content (i.e. blog posts, guides, etc) or follow up at key milestones for them (like if they got a new job, raised a round, etc)
Still not sure how to craft follow-up messages that get replies? Read our post on how to follow up like a pro.
2. Re-Engagement And Churned Customer Campaigns
Whether you are following up with ghost leads or churned customers, it is far easier to engage someone who already has some familiarity with your brand than a cold lead.
Your messaging strategy and frequency will vary depending on context. For example, if you’re looking to re-engage customers, you could create an automated marketing campaign that shows LinkedIn ads to users who visited your site three days ago, but neer returned.
Most marketing platform, including social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter, and Google Ads allow marketing to automate re-engagment tasks.
Transform your business with successful LinkedIn lead generation techniques.
3. Sales Chatbots
Not every sales message needs to be sent by a sales rep. You can leverage AI chatbots to communicate with both prospects and customers on your website, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, etc.
It is best to use sales chatbots to answer frequently asked basic questions or automate repetitive tasks (like payment processes/reminders.) It can also be used to reduce customer service requests.
An added benefit of chatbots is that it works 24/7, so you could be qualifying leads and making sales while you sleep!
4. Lead Management
When all of the sales are being handled by the founder and maybe one salesperson, assigning and keeping track of leads can easily be handled manually.
However, as the sales team grows, you are going to need to create automated processes to keep track of all of your leads, so nothing falls through the cracks. You also want to prioritize the warmest leads and route the right leads to the right people.
This is particularly important if you sell to two or more different types of customers, like SMBs and enterprise companies. You’ll want to route any enterprise deals to enterprise reps.
Sales and marketing automation tools can help with this in various ways, including lead scoring, lead routing, and opportunity management.
5. Nurture Campaigns
If you have a longer sales cycle, it is critical to have automated nurture email campaigns. These campaigns should deliver content based on prospect behavior and where they are in the customer journey.
Where can you do this? Most CRMs, email marketing platforms, and engagement platforms offer this nifty features. For example, in Close you can create email workflow that automatically nurture new leads and push them towards conversion.
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6. Sales Task Management
Most salespeople spend 25 percent or more of their day working on administrative tasks. like CRM data entry or call notes. That’s tons time they aren’t spending talking with prospects and selling.
Automation tools can streamline a lot of these manual, repetitive tasks, like:
- Logging call notes in your CRM
- Attaching call recordings and transcripts in your CRM
- Automatically creating and assigning contact records to the right salesperson
- Enrich prospect data
- Sync data from different software that you use
- Keep track of what steps have been taken for each prospect alongside with where
- they are in the customer journey
- Send and follow up on contract signatures and invoice payments
If you’re looking for a telephony platform or CRM, look for sales task automation tools to eliminate those rote manual tasks.
7. Sales Reporting
You can’t manage and improve what you don’t measure. That’s why sales reporting is so important.
However, you shouldn’t be spending hours manually compiling sales reports each week (or even per month!)
Most CRMS, like Close, have detailed, built-in sales reports, so you can see your sales pipeline and how deals are tracking at any time. This makes it much easier to do everything from sales forecasting to quota setting for your team.
Many sales automation platforms also allow you to download information or port it into BI tools like Power BI or Google Data Studio so you can get more out of your data.
8. Scheduling Meetings
Scheduling meetings is the bane of most salespeople’s day. It requires tones of back and forth–plus juggling different time zones.
Eliminating friction and making it easy to get on a call with a prospect or book a demo is key to closing more deals. If you have to play email tag to find a time to meet, you are leaving a lot of potential deals on the table.
That’s where using a CRM, like Close, that directly integrates with scheduling software, like SavvyCal, comes in handy. With one link (and one email,) you can easily share when you’re available so prospects can pick a time that works.
No more email tags, no more lost leads.
Not only does it mean that a prospect can find a time to meet right on your calendar, but SavvyCal’s UX eliminates a lot of the awkwardness that comes with other scheduling software.
How To Integrate Close And Savvycal To Automate And Close More Deals
With the Close and SavvyCal integration, you can not only book more calls/meetings, but also automatically add all of your lead information to your Close account anytime someone books a meeting.
Here are some additional things you can do with this integration:
- Sync and update contacts in Close. Call activity between SavvyCal, your calendar, and Close are automagically updated.
- Make it easy for sales reps to send proposed times. If you want to guide prospects to book a specific time, you can highlight proposed times right in your SavvyCal link.
- Set up automated round-robin lead routing. You can set up a collective schedule and then route calls to specific reps based on key criteria you set.
- Embed your SavvyCal links anywhere. You can add your SavvyCal link to individual landing pages so people can book wherever is most convenient.
Editor’s Note: Looking for more details on how this integration works? Check out this how-to article.
Ready to book more sales calls and demos? Get a free month of SavvyCal for your whole team using our partner discount code. All you need to do is sign up for a free SavvyCal account here and email support@savvycal.com.
