Sales Enablement

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

How can marketing automation help?

Sales reps can gain visibility into how prospects or leads interact with sales documents they send out. This is just part of the plethora of things marketing automation can do for you. Imagine how powerful it is to understand how far somebody watched a video of your free trial. Imagine how important it is to know where on a page a person stopped scrolling when they’re reading about your products available. These are insights that the sales team can find extremely useful when they’re reaching out to this lead. They’ll have the context required to make a powerful sales pitch.

You need to understand how you can identify when a person is sales ready, the pages that they go to or the pages you should suggest to them, and also the content you should be sending them. And then inform your sales team of the experience they’ve had, such as an automated email saying, “This contact has visited the pricing page and spent 30 seconds or two minutes or 10 minutes reading through it.” The longer they spend could indicate that they’re sales ready or not. You need to get into your data and understand what the right triggers are and set those up to automate and scale them.

Knowledge sharing and transparency

Remember that knowledge sharing and transparency between the sales and marketing teams is critical to the success of the technology when used to assist them, the marketing automation platform, and the CRM.

Knowing a lead

Marketing understands leads as personas, as groups of people as data. The sales team understand leads as individuals, one-to-one conversations. It’s critical that information from the sales team regarding what helps them make a sale, as in sales enablement, so that you can develop those assets, those properties, whatever it is, in a timely fashion to help them make a sale. These marketing assets can be emails and email sequences, social media posts, social media images, public profile recommendations, or canned responses. You will develop what they need to just copy it, personalize it, and go. It’s a huge time saver and it’s been written by the marketers, so it’s got the right branding and the right tone.

Preparing the sales team with notifications

One way you can prepare the sales team is through notifications. When you’re about to launch a campaign, it can be extremely useful to send the context of the campaign to the sales team in advance: 24 hours, 48 hours, an hour, whatever works for them most. This way, they have the context of where the lead is coming from when they arrive in.

Let’s say you wrote an eBook about Facebook. When they come in as a lead after downloading this content, completing your form, the sales team then can start the conversation, going, “Oh, I see that you are interested in Facebook. Would you mind telling me more?”

Contextual sales and marketing are where marketing automation can make things very powerful.

Follow-ups

You can also advise the sales team on good follow-ups to have for someone who has just become a lead. This can be an email template again, or it can be a phone call; there’s many different things it could be. But you can give a set of three things a salesperson can do. This will mean they don’t spend time wondering what to do. You can give everything to them in advance through an automatic notification, pre-populated, where you can edit in the background.

The sales team will also be able to watch if you are working towards your SLA. You can have automatic report notifications sent daily, weekly, or monthly, whatever your sales team prefers. So they can see, are you able to hit your goal? How has it been going? Are you at 150%? It’s very important to be honest with your teams so that you can redevelop the goals if they are struggling to be hit, or if you’re excessively hitting them week on week.