LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2021
There is no silver bullet that can solve all the problems of a marketer. However, marketing automation comes close. Marketing automation is the magic wand that improves employee productivity, boosts organizational efficiency, and increases the competitiveness of an enterprise. It can help marketers leave the routine and rules-based tasks to machines while their human intelligence and time can be spent on higher priority tasks.
Marketers have to routinely create and edit tasks, track sales opportunities, manage customer relationships, and often even provide customer support through social media. Amidst a long list of such routine chores, it is easy to lose track of tasks that are of high priority such as lead qualification, lead nurturing, and campaign reporting. While the damage may not be visible in the short-term, in the long-term this could leave the organization way behind in sales closures and branding.
A financially viable option is to infuse the CRM with marketing automation. Automation can help the marketer take care of the repetitive yet critical matters while they can focus on higher priorities that demand their personal time and attention.
Also, when the CRM is integrated with marketing automation, marketers can create timely and structured programs that run on their own, consuming minimal time and requiring nominal investment. For instance, sending canned email replies to users who respond to NPS surveys, or raising a ticket and sending its details to customers when a complaint is raised are pretty straightforward tasks using automation. .
As a result, it becomes easier for the marketing function to augment their productivity. They are able to spend more time initiating new campaigns or driving the existing ones with more focus which will result in increased lead generation.
Marketing automation also significantly reduces the response time to customer requests, besides giving marketers much better insight into how their campaigns are performing.
However, bringing marketing automation and a CRM on the same page is straight-forward. Fortunately for Salesforce users, marketing automation is not a tough nut to crack. As the world’s leading CRM software, Salesforce can be optimized extensively with marketing automation to help marketers with their cause.
If you are a Salesforce user, there are several ways how marketing automation can help you. In the process, you will see a better synergy between your sales and marketing teams. Ultimately this will help minimize marketing spend while maximizing revenue generation.
Automate Lead Allocation
Marketing Automation can help the marketing team allocate leads to sales teams with ease. Until now, the acquired leads were qualified either by the marketing team or by a specific team ( say, the pre-sales team) created for the purpose. Once the leads are qualified, they are passed on to the sales team through the CRM. This manual process in between lead acquisition and lead allotment creates a time delay during which the lead could be lost. To avoid such a situation, it is better to harness marketing automation for lead management.
Integrating marketing automation with Salesforce ensures that the leads go automatically to the CRM, allowing marketers and sales teams to manage, nurture, and score these leads in a timely manner. For sales teams this means immediate contact with leads when their interest in their product or service is still intact, or even better, fresh. For marketers, it gives an opportunity to connect with those leads who need more nurturing to become hot leads.
Create a unified source of Data
For any marketer, the efficacy of their strategies and decisions is only limited to the data based on which they take those decisions. If the data is incorrect and misleading, the dependent strategies could also misfire. This makes it necessary to have a unified source of data that is free of discrepancies, duplicates, and redundancies.
Salesforce lets you share the same set of data — be it customer email lists or financial records, or a list of prospects, across multiple tools you use within the platform. As a result, there are minimal chances of data duplication or redundancies.
Improve Lead scoring with Einstein
One of the biggest tasks for marketers and sales teams begins after the lead has been acquired. This is one task that will determine whether a strong pipeline of leads can be built and how good it would be. This task is none other than lead scoring.
Lead scoring helps marketers and sales reps assign a specific value to the acquired leads. These are varying values and unfortunately, the mechanism of assigning lead scores varies from organization to organization. This complicates the process as new recruits to the team may not be able to follow the process, or in a worst-case scenario, might even follow the processes adopted in their previous organizations. This can derail the collaboration of the sales and marketing teams.
READ : How to Make the Most Out of Salesforce Post Implementation
Can marketing automation prove to be a problem-solver here? Yes, it can and it comes in the form of Sales Cloud Einstein. According to Salesforce, “Einstein Lead Scoring uses artificial intelligence to automatically analyze your historical sales data and discover the top factors that determine whether a lead is likely to convert to an opportunity.”
With Einstein, lead scoring activity can be automated while will yield tangible results like:
- Accelerated engagement with hot leads
- Identify the factors that affect lead scores
- Maximize lead conversion rates
It spares marketers and sales folks from the chore of manually scoring leads and to use the time and energy to tweak campaigns and sales plays.
Deliver bespoke Content
Every marketer worth his/her salt knows the value of delivering bespoke and tailored content. The challenge is not in creating tailored content, but in delivering it to the right audience at the right time through the right channel.
Content distribution is tricky because there are so many best practices to be followed in terms of timing and messaging. For example, email marketing and social media have extremely diverse timing and messaging traits. It is tedious for any marketer to handle these tasks on a manual basis.
With Salesforce marketing automation through Einstein Marketing Cloud, it is possible to set rules for each channel based on which tailored content will be delivered to customers at the right time and through the right channel. The end result is improved customer engagement which can solve several business challenges, including reducing customer churn.
Final Thoughts
For any organization, irrespective of its size and nature, adopting marketing automation is a huge leap from its existing traditional practices. For stakeholders who are habituated to manual processes, automation can pose to be a disruption to their regular way of work. Also, a sudden shift to automation could actually cause an initial delay due to which lead and revenue generation could also suffer.
As a result, the best way to approach marketing automation in Salesforce is a piecemeal approach. Instead of automating all tasks at once, it is recommended to automate a task or one function at a time. This gives adequate time for the stakeholders to become acclimated to the new way of working and thus prevent a slump in productivity.
Once the chosen tasks show promise in automation, they can be replicated across multiple other tasks to improve overall sales and marketing productivity.
