Many entrepreneurs wrestle with similar problems. When did I recently contact this or that client? Didn’t I forget about someone important? Or how many clients are close to purchase decision and I should take better care of them? And then, when we look at the sales forecast and the number of acquired contacts, there’s even more hesitancy if we don’t loose clients somewhere on the way.
Everyone, who starts fighting this problem looks for a tool, which will allow for better control over marketing-sales process and will demonstrate how it really works. There are usually two initial steps: gathering information about the performance of activities so far and an effort to regulate them. Here, various documents are developed in the form of excel tables or google docs. It’s a first trial to take advantage of something similar to CRM system. Surely, we get a certain picture of our activities but handling of such docs and work on them turns out to be inconvenient. Continuous, manual data update makes companies go further.
A natural next step is searching for a real CRM system, which allows for easy management of data, contact base and current labors in the system done by sales department. Choosing the system, it’s best to begin with drawing up a list of desired functionalities. It’ll quickly turn out that we don’t only need the CRM with contacts base, notes, tasks, reminders and sales funnels. We’ll see that we need to send direct salesperson-client e-mail message, in bulk to the whole base in the form of newsletter and ideally automatically, in a given situation. Consequently, it would be great to identify and monitor behavior of people, who landed in our base individually, rather then generally, what we are offered by, for example, google analytics.
In an ideal situation, we want to have possibility to pursue sales and marketing activities in one tool in order to have the whole company work within common base of potential and current clients, so that we knew precisely what happens with each contact we acquire. Marketing will need message emailing in E-Mail Marketing and many other marketing channels. Sales will need typical CRM. All of that, merged together, will be easy to manage, analyze and plan, and available from anywhere.
Here, we can have an equation:
Such equation will give us simple result: Marketing Automation
Why Marketing Automation
How does the sales department work? First of all they focus on persons, who show greatest interest. Superbly, if they contact with the sales department themselves or during initial phone conversation they ask for more details, demo access, sample or trial version of the product offered. The sales department does its best to provide information, required by the client. However, without Marketing Automation, the sales department only knows about those needs, which were indicated by the client. That’s why the sales focuses on those persons, who show initiative themselves and it’s on average 20% of contacts generated by the company. Here appears the first huge benefit from using Marketing Automation. Unlike the sales department, the system can identify and monitor behavior of all clients being acquired. Next, we can set up automations, which in response to particular behavior of potential clients will react by sending appropriate message in chosen communication channel. If we create such basic automations, on one hand, we’ll begin reaching practically every acquired contact with information they need most at the moment. On the other hand, we’ll discharge and lighten marketing and sales department. The most elementary communication process automation may look as below:
- new contact acquisition
- brochure, newsletter, product profile sent by e-mail 3 days after acquisition
- potential client visit on WWW page
- segmentation based on his/her behavior
- SMS sent with invitation to on-line product or product segment presentation, a particular person was interested in
- message containing on-line presentation summary and additional materials sent
- alert sent to sales department, notifying about contact necessity with the client interested
We can set up such a simple mechanism creating a few automation rules in Marketing Automation system. From that moment, every contact in the base will go under process of preparation for a talk with a salesperson and will get to him at the right moment.
This is just the beginning of Marketing Automation capabilities. Such systems allow for precise monitoring and identification of contacts’ behavior in most marketing and sales channels available for businesses. It makes that every potential client is linked to the activities he was subject to, his reactions and if and when he made a purchase. We receive huge possibilities to analyze proceedings and costs of marketing-sales process, from the first interaction to the purchase and post-sale activities. We can pursue the analysis in micro scale per particular contact or macro for the whole sales funnel. Thanks to this, we’ll learn what drives and fuels our sales and where there’s still potential to exploit.
Multipurpose jackknife effect
Marketing Automation systems are kind of similar to multipurpose jackknife. Most of them, like SALESmanago, contain CRM, E-mail Marketing, Inbound Marketing and automation. This combination merges marketing and sales with potential client reaction. It makes sense because both departments work in order to sell something to client. Therefore, if weekly contact export from CRM for newsletter e-mailing and continuous questions from salespersons about pursued promotional and marketing activities begin to irritate, we’ve got good news. Marketing Automation will make you won’t be bothered anymore.
Back to the jackknife… It has so many functions, which seem needless when we buy it but we still want to have them to be ready for any situation. Marketing Automation system contains many various functionalities and at the beginning we don’t see implementations for them. However, with our business growth and searching for new ways to reach a client, we don’t have to look for new tools and increase our costs. In most cases our system has already have this functionality but we haven’t used it yet. Apart from solving some current problems in the company, Marketing Automation leaves the door open for development and introduction of new solutions. Additionally, we avoid tedious integrations with other systems and the problem of data update and circulation. We’ve got everything in one place, from where it’s easy to manage whole marketing-sales environment in the company.
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