In the article “Smarketing – The Perfect Blend Of Sales And Marketing“, I briefly touched upon the concept of smarketing and took it further in the article “Top Three Things To Watch Out When Combining Your Sales And Marketing Efforts“. Lately the term Marketing Automation has started picking up some steam. Many marketing companies have started using this term extensively in their product and service offerings. And there’s a very valid reason why. Besides many benefits of marketing automation, one key reason that I can think of is that it’s one of the ways to solve the challenges posed in implementing an effective and an efficient Smarketing Solution. In this article, I’ll explain how.
There is a ton of material available on the Internet that explains what Marketing Automation is; If you’d like a simple, unbiased and a quick 5 minutes overview of Marketing Automation, I strongly suggest looking at these two videos posted by Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute.
What’s the Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Management?
How Marketing Automation Support Demand Generation & Lead Management
Thanks Lauren for sharing these great videos! Now let’s see how Marketing Automation can help in making your Smarketing Solution more efficient and effective.
Better Integration Between Marketing Campaigns and Sales CRM Systems
One of the main advantages of a good Marketing Automation Implementation is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales. For instance, good Marketing Automation can help you seamlessly push leads generated via a marketing campaign into your sales CRM system. It can help you set up more targeted campaigns by picking up data from your sales CRM and see which leads are at which step on the sales cycle and push relevant targeted marketing content to them.
Better And Holistic Monitoring of Marketing & Sales Efforts
Another big advantage of implementing Marketing Automation in your company would be that it will help you get a better and a holistic snapshot of your marketing and sales efforts. This means you’ll not only know exactly how much you are spending on each of your campaign, but also which campaign is generating how much sales, and how your campaigns are helping up-sell your products.
Better Marketing & Sales Process Change Management
Making any Marketing & Sales Process effective is a continuous activity that often involves making changes to existing processes, business rules and sometimes even the technology and core infrastructure of the company. Marketing Automation will help you streamline your marketing and sales processes so that they can be easily changed and made more in line with the the changing needs of both the marketing and the sales teams. For instance, imagine asking your sales team to run a campaign where-in you’d like to offer a deal to your existing customers if they gave you some referrals. Many times such campaigns are hard to implement and even harder to track without making significant changes in existing marketing and sales processes. Marketing Automation can help in aligning your existing marketing and sales processes so that such marketing, sales, and lead generation efforts would be easily implementable, track-able, and easily changed as needed.
And so, as you can see, marketing automation helps bringing marketing and sales team closer to each other in a much more efficient and scalable manner; something that’s one of the key goals of smarketing.
