How Marketing Automation Creates Higher Quality Sales Leads
Have you been approached by your sales teams in the past literally begging for more leads or specifically more qualified leads? It’s no longer reasonable to expect (if it ever was reasonable to expect), traditional, digital marketing, or social media efforts to deliver the highest quality sales leads. This is why many organizations across multiple industries are turning to customized Marketing Automation specifically targeted to their ideal clients.
Greater access to information and exposure to emerging technologies are developing a new breed of business development professionals. Marketing automation platforms and CRMs are no longer a novelty--they have become a standard for successful sales-driven organizations--both professional services and consumer products. Considering the need to effectively reach target clients in a digital world, it is increasingly important businesses not just collect information. They need more reliable Intel from those who engage with their services and products online—in essence, they need to be able to harvest behavioral data and analytics to truly measure their marketing investment and engage new clients.
For many businesses, connecting the dots and prioritizing target clients can be a daunting task. To start, connecting databases can be an immense challenge if the logic is to consolidate insights around the lead, contact, account, and/or opportunity. As an example, consider what should be a simple task of pulling together a results-tracking report around tradeshow results. Many marketing teams can measure aspects of the event, but connecting these results is oftentimes challenging because legacy marketing systems don’t “talk” to the CRM. The impact is having a lot of marketing activity that can’t clearly be linked to revenue. Taking this thought a little further, marketing systems that manage web activity, social campaigns, and content may be disconnected from centralized tracking of customer interactions. Combining the full history of how a target client has moved from unknown--to known--to engaged--and then to a paying client, can be challenging at best.
The good news is growth in ubiquitous platforms has reached the marketing world. Rather than struggling to connect the dots through SQL queries, congested lead routing and manual scoring, Marketing Automation is helping businesses truly realize what type of marketing—whether it be social media advertising, digital campaign marketing or otherwise--will produce the highest and most trackable ROI.
Marketing Automaton tells the full marketing story which is essential to demonstrating impact. Your ability to show what particular opportunities was the direct result of marketing interactions is one of the primary ways many corporations are driving new revenue. Being able to connect the dots and gauge ROI from specific campaigns, based on the full set of marketing interactions along the “buyer journey,” delivers a huge competitive advantage to savvy marketers.
The 21st century salesperson and sales manager expects, and rightly so, to have any and all types of information at their disposal to track the value to the organization. Your company’s ability to provide your business development professionals with qualified leads and ROI tracking through marketing automation is a key factor is retaining your top-producers and increasing revenue.