Marketing automation software is designed to streamline marketing and sales efforts and automate repetitive tasks, so your teams better manage their time and get more done. For example, tasks like social media posting, email nurture, and lead scoring can be done automatically, freeing up time for your sales team to meet with prospects and perform adequate phone follow-up.

But, the real question is, can you be successful without marketing automation software? Probably to a certain degree, but you can bet it will require sustained hard work, diligence, and a certain amount of frustration. Without marketing automation software, you’re verifying contact information on your own and re-using boilerplate emails manually (which introduces a high risk of human error). You are likely losing sales to your competitors who are using marketing automation.

Let’s outline this more clearly. Here are five advantages you give up if you choose not to use marketing automation software.

1. Saves Time

Since marketing automation software takes your leads and qualifies them for you, it can save you the effort of reaching out to cold leads that may not be interested in what you have to offer. Even if you are finding that your qualified lead pool is smaller, it’s better to pursue fewer leads that are higher quality than waste your efforts trying to close every lead in your list. Having a tool that can automatically qualify a new lead so that you don’t have to manually, not only saves you time from qualifying but saves you the time of reaching out to someone who isn’t interested.

2. A Shorter Sales Cycle

Marketing automation software helps your team close more sales, and do so faster. It does this by shortening the time it takes to qualify and nurture marketing leads so they become sales qualified leads. By automating your email marketing, you’re able to keep your buyer informed at a consistent pace so he or she moves through their customer journey faster. And since you’ve been consistently emailing them, you’re top-of-mind and the first brand they think of when it comes time to pull the trigger on a solution.

3. Better Lead Nurturing

The lead nurturing process has to be personalized to some extent, and when a sales or marketing team member tries to track all the activities involved in this, it’s easy to forget someone or to let certain opportunities slip away. Marketing automation and personalization go hand-in-hand. Your marketing automation software allows your team to create email drip campaigns that send messages at specified intervals, and it helps them recognize opportunities to reconnect with older leads. Lead scoring and segmenting become faster and more accurate, and workflows can keep team members from forgetting follow-up tasks when leads complete certain actions, like requesting a white paper.

4. Better Alignment Between Sales and Marketing

When your sales and marketing teams use the same software, everyone is able to track and quantify the results of their activities efficiently. Sharing marketing automation software between sales and marketing departments also ensures both teams are oriented toward achieving the same goals. Essentially, it allows information gathered from marketing campaigns to be leveraged to close more sales, which is the main goal of the marketing team in the first place.

5. Customization and Analytics

Marketing automation software helps your team make the most of things, like email outreach and landing pages. It can also help automate emails by providing customizable templates and track what happens once those emails are sent. Did any messages bounce back undelivered? Did recipients open the emails? Did they click on links in the emails? The analytics included in marketing automation software provide this information, helping you determine which actions pay off most, and which are not worthwhile.

Marketing automation software is not just for huge enterprises. In fact, smaller enterprises may benefit disproportionately when they choose an exceptional marketing automation product for their sales and marketing teams. It’s important to read up on various marketing automation tips and choose software that best fits your company’s needs. Think of what you can do with all the time your organization will save and the extra revenue that comes with efficient, automated sales and marketing workflows.