You are probably already familiar with the basics of marketing automation. It automates tasks. It streamlines processes. Overall, it makes our lives a whole lot easier. But a quality marketing automation software is capable of doing much more than just enabling your marketing team. When used to its full advantages, it’s a tool that can ultimately help your sales team close more deals.

By streamlining and optimizing the process of gathering, scoring, and prioritizing leads, your business will be able to drive higher conversions and generate more revenue consistently. But, wonderfully enough, that’s just grazing the surface.

Here are a few more ways marketing automation benefits your sales and improves your bottom line:

Provides a Full View of Your Leads

Effectively qualifying leads can be a complicated process, especially if you’re targeting high-profile businesses or elusive prospects. You may spend hours conducting research — from scouring websites to contacting employees and gathering data from phone calls. Marketing automation tools make understanding your leads a sinch and don’t require tons and tons of manual digging. More specifically, they can:

• Track lead behavior: By leveraging marketing automation software within your CRM, salespeople have insights at their fingertips. They can see what pages of their website their leads have visited, what emails they have clicked on, and what online forms they have filled out. Not only does this help salespeople build relationships faster, but ultimately allows them to respond to leads more quickly.
• Track lead information: Why not automate your qualification process so you can spend more time doing what has to be done by a human? Tools like Contact Enhance can automatically generate key sales information, including company size, history, employee contact information, and more — and deliver that information right to your inbox. Integrate these tools with your CRM so you can get as much information on your leads as possible, which will assist with qualifying.
• Score and qualify leads: Marketing automation helps identify your hotter leads with a simple lead scoring model. Specific scores are applied to customers based on interactions on your website, company information, and content they engage with.
• Prioritize hot leads: There’s nothing more frustrating for a salesperson than having to dig through piles and piles of unqualified leads just to find someone who’s ready and willing to buy. Not only is this a waste of time, but it’s also a poor allocation of resources, which means it costs your business money. The right marketing automation platform should be able to identify and alert the sales team of hot leads so they can focus their efforts where they will produce the best results.

Your business can weigh certain interactions and information differently so that scores and qualifications reflect the actual progress of a lead. This way, when the salespeople receive their leads from various marketing initiatives, they know the hot from the cold and where to focus their valuable sales time. The result — salespeople spend less time cold calling and more time talking to “hot” prospects and earning commissions.

Segments and Nurtures Leads

By using the lead information and scoring your automation software provides, you’ll be able to segment your prospect. Segmenting your prospects is a significant step for effective sales outreach, as separating contacts into various lists allows you to send those lists content that is more specific to their needs.

There are three main stages of the buyer’s journey that your leads can fall into. It’s important to have a lead nurturing strategy that includes content applicable to the top of the funnel through the customer lifecycle.

• Just Looking or “Awareness” Stage: The customer probably doesn’t need a hard sell, but might be better served with a simple three-step email campaign introducing your business and how it can solve a problem they have.
• Shopping or “Consideration” Stage: Create a more focused response to that interest using targeted emails. These emails can be customized according to prospects’ interests, how often they have visited your site, which content they’re downloading, and which product or service page they’re looking at.
• Ready to Buy or “Decision” Stage: Pretty self-explanatory, but prospects at this stage are ready to become a customer. Congratulations, you’ve successfully nurtured them to a sale!

By engaging or nurturing your customers seamlessly using marketing automation software, you can better prepare leads before sending them over to sales.

Keeps Your Brand Top of Mind

Life would be infinitely easier if every prospect were ready to convert at the first interaction. But as we already covered, it takes multiple touchpoints to guide a lead from interested to ready to buy. With marketing automation, a good portion of those touchpoints is handled automatically through email marketing tactics like drip campaigns or newsletters.

This kind of consistent nurture is spaced out so that your leads aren’t feeling too much pressure from you. Instead, they’re being offered educational content to help them make better decisions. The result is them being continually reminded of your brand and product, so when they’re ready to buy, it’s you they’ll call.

Optimizes Sales Efforts

Salespeople are very busy and often move from one meeting to another to another. The key to successfully converting leads into loyal, paying customers is building and strengthening relationships, but it’s tough to do this when you’ve got a dozen or more other things on your plate.

Because automation shifts much of the menial, day-to-day tasks from human to machine, your sales team will be freed up to build more high-quality relationships with prospects and customers without the need to increase staff numbers. They’ll be able to focus on the more important aspects of their job, so sales go up while staffing expenditure stays lean.

Manages Certain Tasks

Instead of working in various apps and platforms for project management needs, your sales team can use marketing automation software to manage their tasks. This keeps everything in one place and avoids unnecessary runaround and confusion.

When creating tasks, there’s the opportunity to get as specific as needed. This includes tying tasks to a perticular contact and deal, classifying the type of task (i.e., call, email, free trial, demo, etc.), and due date. Your team will also be able to assign tasks to other people, so the appropriate person is held accountable.

Offers Data and Analytics

One of the nicest features of marketing automation is the ability to gather detailed analytical data on your customers and leads. This information enables managers to make better decisions on how to focus their efforts and their budgets. And by using a data-driven approach, you’ll be able to better engage your customers, which can lead to higher revenue and a distinct competitive advantage.

What’s more, your automation software can provide you with sales and marketing performance results so you can see how well your efforts are doing. For your campaigns, you’ll be able to examine the open rate, click-through rate, conversions, demo requests, and free trial sign-ups to determine which campaigns need to be adjusted, and which are effective.

The goal of marketing automation software is not just to make the sales team happy, but to give them high-quality and organized leads to make them more productive and drive more revenue for the business. By leveraging automation, you and your team will gain better insights into your contacts and have more time to spend with those leads who are ready to purchase.