Taking advantage of Marketing Automation merged with CRM brings businesses specific benefits and becomes more and more popular among various industries. Suitably used data gathered by Marketing Automation and marketing-sales process automation allow for successful guidance of acquired contacts to the purchase decision. Does this mean that a classic sales representative is redundant?
Of course the question is purely rhetorical. No automat will substitute a human being. Well, at lease for the moment. However, the possibilities offered by Marketing Automation are worth considering and researching. First of all, combining marketing and sales activities into consistent, automated process will let pack the whole operation and possibly secure high probability of the sales win. Such trend can be observed in bigger and bigger number of CRM solutions implementations. In 2013 this market grew by 14% and Marketing Automation market itself reports even higher gain. In fact, it’s been fastest growing IT solution sector for business for five years now.
Sales representative joins in as late as towards the end of client’s purchase process
Nowadays, potential clients are independent and they want to get to know the offer available in the market themselves. It totally changes the perception of purchase and sales process. The first is the way clients buy and the later is the way businesses sell. In fact, contact between client and sales person happens only the moment when potential client has about 70% information needed to make a purchase. It means that the sales process begins at the end of potential client purchase process. Marketing Automation identifies and monitors behavior of visitors on WWW page and helps recognize purchase interest at the very early stage of the whole process. Businesses not using those solutions simply lose control over buyer and have no influence on his decision making process. In that situation, the sales person throws himself in at the deep end and has barely a few minute conversation to convince buyer, who has already formed his opinion about the product.
Why Marketing Automation grants winning the sales
Marketing Automation system allows marketing to communicate with buyer before he himself makes a phone call, which is great advantage for the sales person. Marketing joins in educating potential client and sending him additional information, relevant in the sales process and thanks to that leads him up to purchase and has influence on the whole process.
The system monitors potential and current clients’ behavior, recognizes purchase interests, automatically segments contacts and then communicates them with precisely tailor-made content, delivered at the right moment and communication channel. Bulk information resulting from system performance builds client’s behavioral profile and displays this on a contact charter. Sharing this information in CRM sales system makes the sales person may join in the whole process at the right moment and know very well who he deals with. Since the CRM itself won’t let finalize transaction, there’s the suitable contact from the sales person to do that. According to the Forrester Research survey, only 36% of buyers in B2B find seeing the sales person valuable and meeting their expectations.
Without full knowledge about client needs, even the sales representative with great product preparation is not able to precisely provide key and critical information, which allows to close the deal. While it’s not the highest cost when on the phone, in case of sales representatives travelling to potential clients it really is expensive, as the cost of business trips are not minor. That’s why businesses try to find a way to secure that each trip of sales representative is effective and bears minimum risk. In such circumstances, Marketing Automation is an ideal solution, which will point the best moment to contact the most prospective clients.
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