Selling is becoming a science. Marketers used to make good money trying to predict what messages would stick with potential buyers and make them customers. The return on those messages was difficult to analyze – and certainly not targeted down to individual responses. The days of spray and pray are just about over.
Today, automation in sales and marketing is changing how both businesses and consumers interact with promotional information. Answers are more concrete, and results are easier to predict. Automation improves productivity and provides customer insight and more. Many companies are embracing automation and analytics tools that integrate into existing sales teams to better understand their customers’ buying processes and provide content or assistance in real time to close more deals. If you haven’t bought into the automated sales and marketing trend just yet – here are a few things you’re probably missing.
1. Intent Prediction
When customers behave a certain way, there are inferences that can be made as to how, when and what they will purchase. Understanding these behavior patterns can obviously help marketers better sell in the right medium, at the right time. Automating your sales responses based on what potential customers are doing is not just a time-saver – it’s more effective. People act (for the most part) in predictive patterns. Automating your sales and marketing approaches based on these patterns ups your effectiveness and bottom line.
2. Faster Reaction Times
Are customers abandoning your site in high numbers at a certain junction? Is the bounce rate high on your site or in your app? Automated tracking tools can quickly show you patterns in how customers respond to your marketing messages. This is true for sales emails, shopping carts on e-commerce sites, and app engagement. Using A/B testing, marketers can change direction mid-campaign if results aren’t optimal. This is all possible through automation with little interaction from marketing staff. Beyond just A/B testing, many enterprise automation tools will guide sales organizations to the next best action with a prospect in real time based on what marketing channel they came from and the content they consumed.
3. Content Offerings
Tech platforms that predict customer needs are also able to provide sales teams with the content to move customers through the sales funnel automatically. In other words, your sales team won’t need to guess what language, length, or method of communication will best reach customers. By knowing what content a prospect has already consumed, automation tools can suggest what content they might be interested in next to push them further down the sales funnel. Based on how a particular set of customers respond, the content can be tweaked or revamped to improve engagement. Content creation is a vital part of marketing – automate part of the process to make the most of it.
4. Data Overload
You can never have enough data. Period. Automated tracking and the data it provides to marketers comes with a wealth of opportunities, beyond typical hard sales. Imagine knowing where a prospect came from, what content they are consuming, and what additional content you have available to help them make a purchasing decision (all in real time while they are interacting with your brand). It’s this type of customer relationship and loyalty building that can be automated, based on the type of audience a brand has and even individual consumers. It’s important for marketers to realize that not every message is about selling. Some are just stepping stones to a later sale. By utilizing data set about your customer base to continually provide value, companies can strengthen bonds and increase sales. Having an automated system to interact and build relationships with every prospect puts your sales team in a position to close more deals.
Sales and marketing automation tools will streamline your efforts and help you get to know your customer base even better. Having a holistic view of each prospect that interacts with your brand gives sales professionals the information to build better relationships predicated on being a valuable resource rather than a pusher. Combining real-time data to provide prospects with value based sales interactions and automation tools to streamline sales processes creates a more effective sales force and an engaged customer base.
