The automation of business processes has become an integral part of how the majority of companies run their businesses these days. Otherwise, contact management, lead management, document management and so forth would have been hard pressing, to say the least. Your marketing and sales team would struggle to navigate in the never-ending flow of customer related information. In turn, that would inevitably lead to lost opportunities and decreased profits. Unfortunately, not all businesses realize the significance of automating their businesses processes thus putting their organizations under the risk of being left behind in today’s hypercompetitive business environment.
For instance, what happens if the operations of your sales department are managed without the deployment of a suitable automation solution? First of all, this leads to uncoordinated work of your sales representatives and forces them to track their sales activities differently: some might use Excel spreadsheets, the others will simply make notes on paper and the rest will not bother tracking their operations at all. In result, it will be impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your reps and team overall. At the same time, your marketing team will find it difficult to run personalized email marketing campaigns without having a proper marketing automation software in place. Not to mention lead nurturing – recent studies reveal that, if used appropriately, lead nurturing can result in 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead. Keeping a lead warm until they are ready to purchase from you is what makes lead nurturing so valuable. Generally, only 20% of leads in your sales funnel are ready to make a purchase, while the rest will require a little more persuasion through your lead nurturing tactics.
Obviously, you will be able to boost the productivity of your marketing and sales activities through implementation of top-notch sales and marketing automation systems like www.bpmonline.com/crm/sales-automation-software. Let’s take a closer look at the main advantages that such business process automation systems offer:
Personalized Marketing
Generating a huge amount of high quality leads on a regular basis is a tough task. That’s why your marketers will definitely find marketing automation software particularly useful, as it will significantly simplify the lead generation and lead nurturing processes. Let’s say you have a terrific website, and you want to get as much information on your potential buyers at the earliest stages of acquisition. For this purpose, marketing automation systems feature tools for website behavior tracking that allow users evaluate who is ready to buy and who is just browsing. From the first visit on your website, the system collects a variety of valuable customer information like their location, time of visit, the sections they were most interested in and how much time they spent there. The next step is getting contact details of your prospects. If you have managed to provide enough engaging content, your website visitors will gladly provide their names and emails to download this content or subscribe for your newsletter. Additionally, marketing automation will scan social networks like Facebook and Twitter to extract additional data on your customers. Having such a comprehensive view of your contacts at hand, will enable your marketers to plan personalized email marketing campaigns offering products or services potential customers are actually interested in. Not to mention, it will provide access to detailed analytics on the effectiveness of lead generation sources. That way, you will be able to concentrate on the most efficient ones.
Effective Pipeline Management
In order to boost the productivity of your sales department, you will definitely have to deploy a suitable sales automation system. Statistically, businesses that have established automated sales processes are witnessing an 88% quota attainment while organizations with a formalized sales process observe 18% higher revenue growth than companies without one. The sales efforts of your reps will pay off if your salespeople are managing customers with an automation solution that is backed by a robust business process management platform. Advanced sales force automation systems can detect the missing steps in the sales process and advise the steps needed to move the lead to the next stage of the pipeline. In turn, your sales reps will be able to process larger volumes of customers as well as to beat their quota. Not to mention, the benefits of mobile sales automation apps, as your reps will be able work on their leads without being glued to the monitor in the office. In addition, analytics of sales automation keeps your sales professionals updated on the progress of each individual opportunity.
Alignment of Teams through Sales and Marketing Automation
Sometimes it is hard to maintain healthy relationships between marketing and sales teams. Both of these companies are constantly at odds with each other trying to prove which one is more valuable for the company. Obviously, both of these teams are extremely important and their impact cannot be underestimated. However, whenever anything goes wrong it is practically impossible to avoid pointing fingers at each other. It turns out that misalignment between your core teams is caused by the lack of understanding of what a qualified lead is and lack of communication in general. If you are going to fix this situation, you ought to deploy a sales and marketing automation solution. That way, your employees will be able to coordinate their activities and align their metrics in accordance with sales and revenue goals. Consequently, you will be able to create a cooperative environment at your organization where employees work as an actual team.
While choosing a suitable sales and marketing automation system, it is recommended to make sure that it is seamlessly integrated with your sales automation system on a single CRM platform. That way, you will be able to improve the workflow of your marketers and sales representatives and substantially increase your revenue, as businesses that successfully implemented sales and marketing automation are experiencing 32% increase in profits.