Automation has revolutionized the state of technology. Although not perfect, automation’s ability to increase efficiency has saved businesses thousands if not millions of dollars per year by taking the manual work out of marketing and sales. Organizations interested in growth should consider automation moving forward alongside their powerful sales and marketing teams.
Marketing and sales automation often gets mistaken for the same thing, however. There are a few key differences between marketing and sales automation that we’ll cover in this article.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the use of services or software to automate a variety of marketing tasks. Instead of manually executing these tasks, you’re implementing a tool that helps you speed up the process significantly.
Main Pillars of Marketing Automation
There are 3 main parts to marketing automation that help us learn more about what exactly this type of automation does.
This is about tracking codes that monitor behaviors on websites to use for marketing.
SEO, content marketing, email marketing, and social marketing are examples of automated business development.
- Advanced and Automated Workflow
Essentially this is the complete automation of internal marketing functions.
Types of Marketing Automation Based on Job Function
So what specifically can you do with marketing automation? These are some of the crucial tools you can implement into your automation. All of these in tandem help make your marketing team a well-oiled growth machine.
- Social Media Marketing Automation
These are things like post schedulers, brand watchers, and social media analytics.
This includes customer relationship management (CRM) integration, automation platforms, and analytics.
SEO tools, blogging tools, websites, and analytics would go into this category.
This would be visual software that can measure results in real-time.
- Customer Journey Tracking
Customer journey tools, landing page generations, and analytics are included here.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Automation sounds great so far, and much of modern marketing has at least a few of these tools incorporated into their marketing strategies already. When you start to fully automate the process, you’ll start to see big benefits as well.
You’ll start to scale faster. Modern marketing automation strategies have taken years worth of expected growth and condensed them into months. This, of course, means an increase in revenue to come with it. With the level of competitiveness in the market, this isn't just necessary to grow as an organization, but just to survive in your industry as well.
You’ll create quality leads. When you get the right CRM service, you can reach your target audience with ease. Gaining data insights (like you can with services like Intricately) gives you valuable information and a big advantage in curating your leads too. You’ll be able to interact much more effectively with your potential customers and leads this way.
You’re increasing your value. Of course, saving time means saving money, but you’ll also be saving on resources. Your marketing team won’t need to be nearly as big as it would if you hadn’t incorporated marketing automation, even when you’re experiencing rapid growth.
Marketing touches on several parts of the sales process and that’s another one of the reasons it’s important to introduce automation into your marketing strategy. Of course, automation isn’t a perfect solution, and that’s why you should continue to cultivate best practices for your marketing team to avoid mishaps.
What is Sales Automation?
You could see marketing as the “before” while sales is the “after”. Sales automation primarily deals with CRM tools that track and manage sales leads. Ideally, with the right tools, you should be able to manage sales with minimal manual work.
Main Pillars of Sales Automation
You might’ve seen some of these tools already, but they’re all important pieces to automating your sales process.
Emails and phone calls can now be logged automatically without having to add extra administrative work. You can make them easily accessible to management as well for quality assurance purposes.
Instead of having to manually sort through leads by type, you can use CRM software to sort your leads automatically by type, source, and a variety of different parameters depending on your needs depending on how they interact with you.
You no longer have to worry about timing and email scheduling with sales automation. Scheduling sales emails, personal email threads, and even meeting scheduling can be completely automated.
Not only can you create a record of your leads as we mentioned previously, but you can automate lead assignments as well. Reducing the number of small tasks your team has to do daily makes things run much smoother in the process.
You can give your sales team automatic reminders on what to do next so there’s never any confusion about the next steps in the sales process. It might seem small, but this can help keep the momentum going as your reps (especially newer reps) won’t have to think as much about what they need to get done next.
Consistency is key when it comes to sales. When everyone moves in unison at the same speed, things get done much quicker, which means more conversions, growth, and revenue for your organization. Always make sure the automation tools you’re using are beneficial and not causing speed bumps in your sales process, however. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the idea of automating everything and you start to do too much.
Improved Metrics with Sales Automation
Another fun benefit of automating your sales process is the metrics tracking you’ll now have access to. This is huge because it’ll give you laser-focused insights into what’s working in your company and what isn’t. Here’s a list of what metrics you’ll be able to look at:
- Sales KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) - Revenue by market or territory, net promoter scores (NPS), total revenue/year-over-year growth, average lifetimes, and market penetration.
- Sales Activity - The number of demos, scheduled sales meetings, conversations via email, phone, etc.
- Sales Outreach - Social media metrics, phone sales metrics (callbacks, etc.), email sales metrics.
- Sales Channel - Partner customer stats like cross-selling, upselling, retention rates, etc., and partner performance stats like profit margins, revenue, average deal size, etc.
- Sales Productivity - Average number of sales tools used, time spent on content, selling, manual data entry, etc.
Metrics are valuable and give you a clear view of what’s happening with your business, for better or for worse. You can take action to make improvements and properly nurture your organization to become the best it can be.
How Intricately Helps with Sales Automation
Leads are a huge part of sales, and it’s especially important to figure out the quality of your leads before pursuing them. Intricately has in-depth data insights that can streamline the process of sorting your leads to make things easier than ever for your sales team. The Intricately app features the ability to create lists and track your target market to see what services they’re already using, their overall spend on a variety of different categories, and more. If you’re interested in seeing how Intricately can help you grow your organization and find revenue faster than ever, go to Intricately.com/demo today to request a personalized demo.
Breakdown: The Difference Between Marketing Automation and Sales Automation
To sum everything up, the key differences between marketing and sales automation are simple. Marketing automation creates leads, while sales automation closes deals. Marketing automation is meant to create the first line of your sales funnel while sales carry your leads forward into conversions. Sales and marketing are very similar now, so while it may seem easy to interchange the two, they’re very much their own distinctive thing.
The Downsides of Automating Sales and Marketing Tasks
Of course, no system is perfect. Automation can’t fully replace people, so what are the downsides of automating these processes?
Improper lead handing can occur in automation, which can easily be prevented as long as you keep your sales and marketing teams on the same page. Lead quality, lack of nurturing, and acting too quickly are some of the common mistakes people make when they move to automation. A meeting request too early or improper follow-up timing can cause you to lose valuable leads, so make sure you set your sales and marketing teams up for success with reminders.
Ignoring your lead generation doesn’t mean you’re forgetting to get leads, but often people forget to strategize and do something of substance with them. It’s a good feeling when you see a lot of leads come through after you’ve implemented a state-of-the-art lead generation technology, but it’s important to follow that up with good content, good social marketing, and a strong email campaign.
Email templates are an essential part of moving things along quicker in sales and marketing, but one of the pitfalls of automation is relying too heavily on it to do all the work for you. Sales reps can start to rely too heavily on email templating and forget the purpose of why they’re there and don’t customize the emails to fit a prospect. Personalizing these emails is important, so it’s good to remind your sales team to add those extra touches to make things perfect.
Final Thoughts on Task Automation for Marketing and Sales Teams
Automation is a big part of what’s brought us into the future, not just in business, but as a whole. It makes our everyday lives easier to manage and facilitates the mass amounts of growth we see organizations do every day. As with anything though, it can’t be perfect, but it can be close as long as you don’t rely too heavily on automating everything.
