6 Ways Marketing Automation Software Helps Drive Sales

Marketing automation is a powerful way to prime your revenue engine by ensuring each member of your team can accomplish more in a day. With automation, you can abstract away some “busy work” that comes with common marketing tasks and stay more focused on high-level priorities.

Organizations of any size can benefit from marketing automation, and all kinds of enterprises have been adopting it more aggressively over the last few years. It can help you reach more of your potential and may even prevent you from having to expand your team headcount.

The value of marketing software isn’t limited to the marketing team alone.

It has an effect on your entire operation, but especially on sales.

Let’s consider just a handful of the ways marketing automation drives sales:

1. Scoring Leads

Lead scoring is one of the most potent methods of equipping sales teams to spend their time focused on decision-makers best qualified to make the buy. While it can take months to devise your own in-house scoring system, marketing automation software does it quickly.

2. Accelerating Follow Up

Follow-up is perhaps the most important task most sales teams aren’t doing enough of. To make it work, sales pros need to research each lead and prepare customized outreach. Automation suites are built to take care of the detail work for exactly this situation.

3. Segmenting Lead Nurturing

Following leads throughout the buyer journey is essential to providing sensible and customized customer touches. Software gives you the end-to-end view you need and allows you to see the exact moments when each sales lead moves to a new stage.

4. Organizing Lead Capture

Of course, a true bird’s-eye view includes full attribution of when someone enters a sales funnel in the first place. How a lead was first captured influences much of what follows, and keeping that in mind can shorten the sales cycle. That’s even true of the long B2B cycle.

5. Reducing Response Time

Research has shown that contacting a lead within one hour of an expression of interest is the most effective way to make a first impression. After the first few hours, the impact tapers off noticeably. Automation helps you aspire to that snappy response.

6. Orchestrating Cross-Sells and Upsells

It’s much easier to sell to an existing customer than to attract a new one. It not only costs less, but your established buyers are likely to spend more. With automation, heightened awareness of a customer’s transaction history makes it easier to see follow-on sales opportunities.

Marketing automation empowers marketing and sales to do more. With shared information and insight, it also helps both teams synergize. Once everyone fully adopts an automation suite, it can pay for itself rapidly.