A Better Way to Sell
A lead generated through a solid demand generation strategy, supported by a robust marketing automation tool, will ensure a nurtured, mature, sales-ready lead is turned over to an eager salesperson. This process for accelerating lead qualification can significantly lower the overall cost of sales. It can also expedite getting a qualified prospect with a potential opportunity into your sales pipeline.
By removing the distractions of sales teams serving as early educators, and manually nurturing unqualified leads, you enable them to focus their attention to pipeline activities. Doing so will enable them to progress an opportunity through the sales cycle faster. Want them to be more effective in moving opportunities through their life cycle?
Get them back to these six core things every great salesperson loves to do:
- Build Relationships
- Follow-Up With An Interested Prospect
- Scope the Work
- Create and Put Forward Proposals for Consideration
- Negotiate
- Close More Deals
Marketing automation is agile enough to support your unique lead lifecycle needs, from attraction and capture through the nurture phase, all while scoring leads at every stage of engagement.
Business Intelligence Reigns
The marketing automation process provides business intelligence most salespersons or sales teams would want:
- A visitor’s or lead’s engagement with your online content which could signal their WHY for being on your website.
- Detailed campaign information. What brought them to you in the first place? What campaign or offer triggered their response? An advertisement, trade show, or article perhaps? If so, what campaign(s) can be associated with closed-won opportunities?
- Possible additional needs or pain points they might be trying to address or solve at their company. While it could loosely be related to the original inquiry, it’s also equally possible that clicking around your website and lingering on other solutions you offer may signal opportunities that otherwise may have remained unknown to sales.
- A measurement of the prospect’s interest through an objective lead score. The lead score is a dynamically, pre-determined, and auto-assigned number often associated with demographic details such as title, region, and company. Lead scores are for scoring of behavioral activity that can occur as a result of engagement with your online marketing assets such as your website, content downloads, and form submittals. A lead score that is trending upward would be an overt buying signal indicating that a lead (suspect) is now sales-ready and a salesperson should reach out.
Marketing and Sales Need Each Other
Marketing and sales are functionally distinct. And yet, they are reliant on one another for any lead-to-opportunity process to succeed. Working together in alignment, and playing to each team’s unique strengths is just smart! Marketing automation is one tool that serves to empower marketing and accelerate sales. Marketing automation creates efficiencies in sales pipeline processes and promises an improved prospect-to-customer conversion experience.
To find out more about the unintended consequences of sending your sales team a lead that isn’t ready yet, click here to read more.
