How Marketing Automation Can Help Your Sales Team

Sure, marketing automation is technically for marketers (it’s right there in the name). But marketers don’t operate in a silo (or at least they shouldn’t). Good marketing automation has benefits for marketing and sales teams:

• It can help sales teams track their interactions with prospects and customers.
• It can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the sales process. 
• It can help sales teams stay organized and better manage their pipeline of opportunities.

Keep reading to discover four tangible ways marketing automation benefits your sales team and how you can start using it today. 

What is Marketing Automation? 

To answer that, let’s go to the experts over at HubSpot (which, BTW, is the most popular marketing automation software provider, with over 29% market share). 

According to HubSpot, marketing automation “uses software to automate monotonous marketing work. … Not just for the sake of efficiency but also to provide a more personalized experience for customers. The technology behind marketing automation makes these tasks faster and easier to do.”

In practice, marketing automation tools can include everything from a simple way to manage emails or customer segmentation to fully automated systems that help with lead scoring, SMS, sales lead rotation and more. 

So, marketing automation exists to make businesses more efficient. But automation is more than just time-saving. It also increases collaboration among sales and marketing and ultimately assists in closing more deals. 

In fact, Nucleus research found that every dollar invested in marketing automation showed a six-fold return and yielded a year-over-year growth rate of 10%. It’s no wonder global marketing professionals (per Statista) report that marketing automation is the No. 1 most effective digital marketing technique (tied with content marketing). 

4 Ways Marketing Automation Benefits Sales

1. It Saves Time and Increases Productivity

By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, sales teams have time to focus on more strategic activities that will help them close more deals. Marketing automation also helps sales teams stay organized and keep track of their prospects and customers. Having all of the relevant information in one place can save a lot of time that would otherwise be spent searching for data. 

More time-saving benefits of marketing automation include: 

• Better-qualified leads. Tracking where leads are in the funnel means only the most-qualified leads make it to the sales team. Sales wastes less time engaging with prospects who were never going to convert in the first place or who are too early in the buyer’s journey to make a commitment. Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.
• Scheduling. Automating the scheduling process can save up to 80% of the time salespersons would otherwise spend on setting up appointments or scheduling meetings. 

Fast Fact: Marketing automation leads to an average 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. (Invespcro)

2. It Encourages Collaboration

Sales and marketing teams are often siloed within organizations, with little communication or coordination between the two. This can lead to inconsistency in messaging and a disconnect between what sales is saying to prospects and what marketing is saying. 

Marketing automation helps to bridge this gap by providing a single platform for both sales and marketing to use, ensuring that everyone is on the same page as each lead moves down the funnel toward conversion. 

Fast Fact: 35% of marketers report that the top reason to implement marketing automation is to streamline marketing and sales efforts.

Marketing automation also allows sales and marketing teams to work together to create cohesive campaigns that are targeted to the right audience and deliver consistent messaging. This results in a better experience for prospects and customers alike, as they receive clear and consistent information from your organization.

3. It Offers Greater Insight 

Marketing automation allows you to track results and ROI for your sales and marketing efforts so you can see which activities are most effective at driving leads and closing deals. This data can then be used to inform future strategy by leaning into what works and abandoning what doesn’t. 

Marketing automation data is also useful for keeping information current. A common platform also allows both sales and marketing a seamless way to integrate information about new and existing leads and customers — whether marketing is gathering data through online forms or sales is collecting information on paper during a trade show.

4. It Helps Close Deals

Ultimately, all of these benefits lead to one thing: increased revenue for your business. Marketing automation can help you close more deals by giving you the ability to track your prospects’ activity and score them based on their engagement. This way, you know who your best prospects are and when it’s time to reach out to them.

And it works. According to VentureBeat, “80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase.”

Sales and Marketing: Better Together

There’s a lot of overlap between sales and marketing automation, just as there’s often a fair amount of overlap between sales and marketing staff in small and midsized companies. No matter the size of your organization, though, it’s important to have a plan for collaboration between sales and marketing to integrate strategies and processes. 

Marketing automation is one of the most powerful tools businesses have to create consistent, personalized messages from the first marketing email to the final handshake from sales.