MARKETINGAUTOMATION TIPS STRAIGHT

FROM SALES

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The reality is that marketing automation plays multiple roles: the marketing team can use it as a tool to bring in leads, qualify them, and pass them on to sales; and the sales team can use marketing automation as a selling facilitator, providing them with the sales intelligence they need to personalize their sales messages and reach out to prospects at the right time.

According to Salesforce’s 2015 State of Marketing report, B2B businesses reported that their most pressing business challenge is new business development. Ultimately, driving revenue is an effort that involves optimizing the sales funnel from start to finish — from a prospect’s initial touchpoint with a marketing campaign to the moment that sales closes the deal. You read that correctly: converting leads into customers involves both marketing and sales, and marketing automation is the weapon of choice to make it happen.

Whether you’re a sales user trying to navigate the benefits of your new marketing automation platform — or a sales manager evaluating an automation tool for your team — this guide will provide the tips and best practices you need to be first into every deal, personalize every conversation, and improve overall productivity. In fact, our own

Pardot sales reps have had great success using marketing automation during the selling process — and they’ve teamed up with sales leaders across the B2B industry to offer a few tips that can help you find success as well

From set-it-and-forget it nurturing messages to instantly identifying the best prospects, you’ll hear how sales teams make marketing automation work for them — and better understand how the different types of sales roles, including cold-callers, Account Executives, and Sales Managers can use marketing automation to crush their quotas.

Think marketing automation is just for your marketing team? Think again.

Turn Cold Calls into Warm Calls ...........................3

Put a Lead Qualification Process in Place. ...........7

Nurture Leads Who Aren’t Ready to Buy .............9

Use Data to Personalize Every Conversation .... 12

Conclusion ........................................................... 14

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TABLE OF CONTENT

Many B2B organizations have members of their sales team who are devoted to prospecting. This is a hard job as it is, but imagine how difficult it can be with absolutely no insight into your buyers interests, pain points, and motivations. Marketing automation helps tackle this challenge by giving reps the intelligence they need to reach out at the right time — and with the right information, to boot. Talk about a confidence booster!

Email Tracking:

Marketing automation simplifies the outreach process by telling reps when leads are clicking on links in their emails, which links they’re clicking on, and which content they’re interested in. This gives sales reps the intel they need to make informed calls, not cold calls.

Real-time Alerts:

Most marketing automation tools provide prospect tracking to give you real-time insight into your prospects’ activities. By customizing these real-time notifications to display the actions that are most important to your sales team, reps can be notified the moment that one of their prospects downloads a piece of content, views the pricing

Turn Cold Calls into Warm Callspage, submits a form, and more. These notifications signal to sales reps that appropriate action is needed, and arms them with the information they need to reach out to individual prospects with a personalized sales message.

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Get The Sales MVP’s Secret to Success

Be first, be relevant, and be productive with real-time insights from Salesforce Engage. Salesforce Engage uses information or content that’s been gathered or created in Pardot marketing automation to empower sales reps by:

• Giving reps access to a library of marketing-approved email templates and nurturing tracks

• Notifying reps of prospect actions and helping them start conversations with a real-time feed of prospect activity — in their CRM, on their desktop, or on their mobile device.

• Providing advanced insight into how sales campaigns are performing.

Learn more about how top-performing sales reps are using Salesforce Engage to dominate their quota in our e-book, A Day in the Life of a Sales MVP.

“Salesforce Engage accelerates the sales cycle incredibly well. If you’re not using it, you risk losing clients to the competition. Time kills all deals.” - Brendan Kelliher Account Executive Salesforce

“Knowing the right time to engage a lead is very important. I have a much better chance of engaging a lead while they are on the website or reading a whitepaper. Pardot’s Engage functionality gives Sales reps those insights without overcomplicating their Salesforce environment.”

- Dave Bloch Solution Engineer Salesforce

Learn More

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How can you take advantage of these real-time notifications and improve your visibility into the sales process? Top-performing sales reps have the following advice to offer:

“For some companies, cold calling is a part of being in sales. But what if it didn’t have to be? What salesperson would pass up the opportunity to make warm calls instead?”

- Michael Wentworth Business Development Representative Salesforce

“Successful outbound calling requires a specific strategy, and marketing automation enables an effective execution through the visibility it provides. Every outbound caller loves to have a stated ‘reason to call’ those prospects at the top of the funnel, and that reason is provided by marketing automation.

My team is able to establish a connection early on in the prospect relationship based on where the prospect’s interests lie (i.e, what content they look at, how often, social data, etc.), making for an enjoyable customer experience. Further, our post-conversation email follow-ups are super relevant — we include content that we can track and then go back and leverage during our next discussion.”

- Alison Gooch Senior Manager, Salesforce

“As a Sales Development Rep, we are tasked with working hundreds of leads every day. Marketing automation helps us to tailor our conversations based on what leads have viewed and interacted with online. We can also see when they’ve engaged with us so we can be sure we are reaching out while their interest is still top of mind.”

- Mark Heffernan Sales Development Representative Salesforce

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“Marketing automation turns a cold call into a much warmer conversation by knowing a prospect’s interests and engagement.”

- Ana Wilker Sales Development Representative Salesforce

“I love getting real time alerts for people I spoke with months ago who said they weren’t ready to buy. It gives me the opportunity to strike while the iron is hot! I can engage with them when they are engaging with us.”

- Kelly Lacy Account Executive, Salesforce

“I love being able to see what my prospects are doing in real time — and how interested they are in my product line. I can plan my day based on the prospect’s previous activities and the fact that they’re ‘raising their hands’ wanting to speak to me.”

- Chris Heiden Sales Engineer Salesforce

“Know what deserves an action. Not all activities deserve a response from sales. Prioritize the activities that your reps should be following up on, like visiting your pricing page or filling out a ‘contact us’ form.”

- Mathew Sweezey Marketing Evangelist Salesforce

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In most B2B organizations, marketing typically works to generate leads for sales using advertising and other campaigns. Often there is no ftormal lead qualification process in place to see if those leads are any good. Why not just pass along every lead to sales and let them sort it out? After all, the more leads the better, right? We’ve got goals to hit!

In fact, dealing with too many leads can be just as detrimental as not having enough. According to MarketingSherpa, 61% of marketers pass all leads to sales, but only 27% of those leads are qualified. In other words, 73% of the leads that sales gets from marketing are unqualified. Sales teams can get lost in a sea of leads and lose a lot of time reaching out to people who aren’t actually ready to buy — or those that simply aren’t a good fit at all.

Our sales experts agree: marketing and sales teams need to partner up and shake hands on what a qualified lead looks like.

Fortunately, marketing automation allows leads to be automatically qualified based on how they interact with your company’s marketing and selling efforts. When leads engage with marketing content, visit your pricing page, open one of your sales emails, or take any number of other important actions, they are automatically assigned a lead score to indicate their interest levels. The higher the score, the higher their interest.

Put a Lead Qualification Process In PlaceLeads are also assigned a lead grade based on their demographic information, such as their company size or industry. Using a combination of lead scoring and grading, marketing can filter out the bad leads and sales reps can easily prioritize the hottest ones for follow-up.

Take some advice from the sales reps who are in the trenches, and invest in a lead qualification process at your company. Here are a few tips that can help.

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“As a busy salesperson, marketing automation effectively helps me manage where I should be spending my time in order to close the most business. Through lead scoring and prioritization, I am able to quickly identify the hott leads that are most likely to buy. For those who aren’t quite ready, I can easily put them in a nurture campaign to stay top of mind.”

- Keith Bauer Account Executive Salesforce

“Work with your marketing team to establish a common definition of a qualified lead. This will prevent tensions between the two teams down the line, and will ensure that only high-quality leads get passed from marketing to sales.”

- Phil Simpson Sales Manager Salesforce

“Being able to use Pardot’s separated lead scoring and lead grading to differentiate how interested the prospect is in us versus how interested we are in the prospect is huge. We’re able to see that not only does an individual prospect have a high score, but they are also an excellent fit for our sales team.”

- Jeff Ostenson Sales Engineer Salesforce

“There’s only so much time in the day, especially during prime calling hours! Time management is always challenge. Marketing automation allows me to leverage my daily prospect report as a call down list. This, combined with real-time alerts, and scoring and grading, ensures I’m spending my time on the right leads.”

- Rachael Weis Account Executive Salesforce

“As sales reps, the one thing we can’t change is how many hours we have in the day. By using functionality like lead scoring and grading, I can understand who has the highest propensity to buy, and am able to focus my time and efforts on the highest quality leads. This cuts down on the hours during the week spent with customers who just aren’t ready to engage yet, and through nurturing, I know I’ll be alerted in real time when they are actually ready to talk.”

- Joey Brown Account Executive Salesforce

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Today’s buyers have all the tools they need to research products on their own before talking with a sales rep — and they often prefer to do so. In fact, a recent study by Forrester Research show that 74% of buyers are conducting more than half of their research online before making a purchase. Furthermore, according to a 2015 study by International Data Corporation, 65% of buyers only engage a vendor when they have already made a purchase decision.

But this doesn’t mean that you can’t kickstart the relationship-building process before a prospect is ready to engage. Lead nurturing not only serves as an unobtrusive way to introduce a prospect to the sales rep they’ll be working with, it also establishes your company as a credible source of information — so that when a prospect is ready to talk, a foundation of trust has already been built.

So how does it work? Lead nurturing campaigns can be set up in advance by your marketing team to deliver content to your buyers over time. Non sales-ready leads can be placed on targeted campaigns that will deliver educational marketing content to help warm them up. For busy, on-the-go sales reps, leads can even be added to these pre-built nurturing programs right from their CRM, or even from their

Nurture Leads Who Aren’t Ready to Buymobile device. Messages are dynamically personalized so that they appear to be from each individual rep, helping to encourage that relationship right from the start.

See what top-performing sales reps have to say about their success with lead nurturing — and what tips they would offer sales reps and marketers at other companies as they begin setting up nurturing programs of their own.

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“Lead nurturing should be set up according to the buying stages that each lead is in. If someone is in the awareness phase, don’t send them branded content. Send them content that will help them do their job better. A helpful article goes a long way. Once someone starts engaging, you can begin talking about your solution and how it can help.”

- Dave Bloch Solution Engineer Salesforce

“Of course I love closing business! But sometimes people aren’t ready to buy from me right away. They may be waiting on budget approval, or stuck in a current contract, for example. Auto-nurturing the leads who asked me to call back in six months allows me to focus on the the people who are ready to buy today — without losing touch with my longer-term prospects!”

- Phil Simpson Sales Manager Salesforce

“As a salesperson, I have so much on my plate and my focus is always going to be on driving revenue. Sometimes even buyers who meet our qualification level need to be warmed up before they are really ready to dive into a sales cycle. I don’t have time to do this manually, so I heavily rely on nurturing campaigns with content that’s relevant to each of my buyers depending on where they are in the cycle. Marketing automation allows me to reach greater volumes of people while still being strategic. This leads to more opportunities and closed business for me!”

- Elizabeth Hicks Account Executive Salesforce

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“Using drip nurturing to stay in touch with cold leads while still pursuing your hotter leads keeps you in the game, and prevents prospects from getting picked up by your competitors when they do start to engage.”

- Jason Frizzell Senior Account Executive Salesforce

“Use ‘light’ HTML emails (or plain text emails) based on data collected by your automation system to make it appear as though reps are sending personalized, one-to-one emails to each prospect. It’s personalization at scale.”

- Mathew Sweezey Marketing Evangelist Salesforce

“Nurturing tracks built by marketing are an incredibly powerful shortcut for sales. As a rep, my biggest asset is my time, so being able to send tailored content with little effort is key. Then I can see who bubbles to the top and engage them at the perfect time, with the perfect follow-up — it’s game-changing.”

- Kyle Martin Account Executive Salesforce

“Sales needs to get into deals earlier — and it’s not through generic, unsolicited blast emails. You’ve got to be teaching, you have to be building trust through that educating process.”

- Jill Rowley Evangelist and Startup Advisor #SocialSelling

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According to a survey by International Data Corporation, B2B technology buyers receive an average of six phone calls and fourteen emails per day from vendors. To cut through the noise, many companies are beginning to explore social selling as an alternative. Using the social profile lookups available in a marketing automation platform, sales reps can tap into the wealth of social data that their prospects are sharing, see where their prospects are engaging online, develop valuable one-to-one relationships, and jump into conversations with targeted, relevant information.

The most important takeaway is that more often than not, your buyers are seeking out information from their peers and third-party sources — not because they don’t trust you, but because they trust those sources more. Buyers aren’t going to be receptive to a sales pitch. In order to be successful, sales reps must shift their mindset from selling a product to solving a buyer’s needs.

Here are a few crucial things to keep in mind as you get begin using social and prospect data as a part of your selling strategy:

Use Data to Personalize Every Conversation

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“Better understand your prospects with social data, so that when you engage with them, you’re having relevant conversations that make a great first impression. The important thing to remember is not to use this information incorrectly. If you’re using this data for sales purposes, be tactful. Don’t tell your prospects everything you know about them because that can be extremely off-putting — and that one mistake can cost you the deal.”

- Phil Simpson Sales Manager Salesforce

“The successful modern sales professional is an information concierge, a content connoisseur — someone who has deep subject-matter expertise on the buyer and the world in which the buyer exists.”

- Jill Rowley Evangelist and Startup Advisor #SocialSelling

“Which mediums and platforms are for personal use, and which are for business? Sales reps are conducting business engagements, so they should be responding via business mediums. Don’t comment on your prospect’s Facebook status — instead, shoot them an email or reach out over Twitter. It’s all about mutual respect.”

- Mathew Sweezey Marketing Evangelist Salesforce

“Asking your prospects to be your friend on Facebook is a horrible, horrible idea. Always be aware of what is socially appropriate before you start using social data to your own advantage.”

- Derek Grant VP of Sales SalesLoft

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ConclusionUse the tips and advice provided in this e-book to guide your sales strategy as you begin working with your marketing automation tool — or, to fine-tune your existing strategy if you’ve already implemented an automation system at your company. Remember, even though marketing automation features the word “marketing” in the title, your sales team has just as much to gain. Sales leaders industry-wide are a testament to that fact!

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Sales Statistics67% of the buyer’s research process is now done digitally. (Forrester Research)

By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship without talking to a human. (Gartner)

80% of all marketing-sourced leads are mishandled by sales. (Forrester Research)

80% of the average sales person’s day is spent on non-revenue generating activities. (TeleSmart.com)

The average sales cycle has increased by 22% over the past five years due to more decision makers being involved in the buying process. (SiriusDecisions)

45% of companies report that their sales reps need help figuring out which accounts to prioritize. (Lattice Engines/CSO Insights)

42% of sales reps feel they do not have the right info before making a sales call. (Lattice Engines/CSO Insights)

Salespeople spend as little as 15% of their time actually engaging with customers. (Alexander Group)

78% of B2B buyers expect sales representatives to personalize interactions based on information from their online activities. (IDC, 2015)

High-performing sales teams are 4.5x more likely have a 360° view of their customers than underperformers. (Salesforce, 2015)

Sales reps’ use of mobile apps will increase 125% over the next two years. (Salesforce, 2015)

50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds first. (InsideSales.com, 2014)

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Your customers are smarter, more capable, and better- informed than ever before. This new breed of consumer demands a better breed of marketing, and the Pardot platform has the capabilities to get you there.

Smarter Marketing.Better Results.

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