Salesforce is an enormously useful tool for generating additional sales and improving the ROIs in your business. However, as with all digital marketing tools, making the most of Salesforce requires a cohesive and considered strategy.
Salesforce’s strengths are in CRM and marketing automation. Companies that use marketing automation tend to find they get better results from lead generation initiatives, and to quite a significant extent. Salesforces’ own research shows that automation generated 53% higher conversion rates, and 9.3% higher sales quota. Those numbers should be taken with a pinch of salt because they come from Salesforce itself, but the reality is that businesses do benefit from effectively managed marketing automation.
So how can marketing automation assist your business, and how should you capitalise on it?
1. Use marketing automation to identify warm leads
Having automation track a prospect’s activity across your website is critical, as it takes a lot of the guesswork out of determining a prospect’s sales readiness. Having automation assign a visitor a score that will adjust based on how they interact with your content will then tell you which of the visitors are the most likely prospects, and that in turn means you can filter through a list to sales of those who are already ready to make a purchase, saving them the time and energy in chasing after leads that ultimately go cold.
2. Get the sale over the line more quickly
If a prospective customer is researching around, then they are much more likely to go with a vendor that responds first, with all other things being equal. One of the great things about Salesforce marketing and automation is that it enables your sales team to be the one that does respond first by operating in real time, by automatically passing on leads that have reached a certain score threshold that makes them a warm prospect. The sales team will get an alert, telling them that a new lead has been assigned, and can from there follow up immediately.
3. Bring the sales and marketing teams into closer collaboration
One of the great inefficiencies in business is often the distance between marketing and sales. Both groups within the organisation will have their own tools and projects, and they aren’t necessarily collaborative in nature. Automation helps introduce that collaborative element, by unifying both the sales and marketing teams across a single platform, and making sure that both “sides” have access to the data that they need.
Though automation, marketers can create and monitor the content that the sales team needs, and then monitor the effectiveness of the sales team’s interactions with customers, using feedback from that end to further refine the content that customers see. Even if the two teams aren’t interacting directly, sharing the automation platform provides them with a centralised resource to work off, which ultimately unifies the business and creates centralised marketing strategies.
4. Create long-term relationships with customers across the entire cycle
One of the challenges that face both marketing and sales is in building those long-term relationships; providing prospective customers with the kind of information and content they need, and then following up with the developing of a relationship around sales, follow-up sales, value-adding services and so on. Both marketers and the sales team look to customers as long-term relationships, and one of the critical features of automation is its ability to nurture leads by keeping track of each interaction that either sales or marketing has had with the prospective customer.
5. Prepare comprehensive reports for review
Finally, marketing automation can generate comprehensive reports on the performance of the brand both from a marketing and sales perspective, and this information can be used to further inform changes in strategy, identify weaknesses in the funnel, or alternatively highlight where the strengths are for further development. Having this data collated from a central point is a key benefit, as otherwise organisations need to try and draw insights from multiple sources of data, and building the links between that data can be both challenging and inefficient.
“Automation” doesn’t mean that your organisation can become “hands off”. Rather, Automation takes the load from the mundane and process-driven projects off staff, reducing the risk of error, and allowing the sales and marketing team to focus on higher value pieces of work.
For more information on managing your Salesforce investment, capitalising on the opportunities that automation provides your business, and approaching both sales and marketing from a more strategic perspective, contact the expert team at IVE DDC. We specialise in assisting brands make the most of their digital marketing spend, and their online presence, and with Salesforce being such a core part of the CRM systems of so many modern businesses, we’ll help you make the most of that investment.
