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How to Use Your CRM and Marketing Automation Tools to Work Smarter, Not Harder

6/17/2024

 
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We've all heard the expression "work smarter, not harder." When it comes to your sales and marketing teams, getting the most out of marketing automation is one way to do just that. Proper use of marketing automation tools, combined with the capabilities of a CRM system, can sharpen the efficiency of your overall sales process.

Of course, this requires your sales and marketing teams to work together. For instance, there has to be alignment on how to set up automations, when to implement drip campaigns, and how to score leads. But once that alignment has been achieved, you are on your way to building a high-performing sales organization poised for growth. The next step is to use technology to leverage up your sales and marketing activities and increase overall effectiveness. 

What Is Marketing Automation?

The phrase "marketing automation" gets thrown around a lot, but you may wonder what it means. In short, it's a catchall phrase given to software applications that engage with prospects in the funnel based on their online actions. As far as what the customer sees, this usually involves email messages sent to them automatically based on their specific actions or series of actions, pop-up chat boxes specific to certain webpages on a website, or other methods of digital outreach triggered by an action they've taken.

For example, if a prospect scrolls down your company's homepage, a chat box may pop up offering to assist them. Or if a prospect has already signed up for your email list and visits a specific product page, that action may trigger an email offering them more info on the product or similar offerings. The main concept is that automation behind the scenes serves some type of predetermined content that marketing believes is valuable to a lead, based on that lead’s actions.

If you think about marketing automation in this way, these strategies and the corresponding automations enable your organization to be more attentive to your prospects and leads in ways no marketer or sales rep could ever do on their own. Instead of staying attuned to dozens of prospects at a time, your teams can stay connected with thousands of them! 

How To Get the Most Out of Marketing Automation and CRM Systems

First, it's important to clarify what a CRM is. "CRM" stands for "customer relationship management." It is a contact management system for your prospects and customers that doubles as a segmentation platform. When your marketing automation is properly integrated with your CRM, your data becomes supercharged data. Ultimately, sales and marketing can work more cohesively and effectively. How?

The goal is to combine the information you have about your customers in your CRM with marketing automation. This integration allows you to automate appropriate follow-ups and touchpoints at the right time and place in the sales funnel. As a result, you can enhance the serving of relevant content to your leads, prospects, and customers, enabling the lead scoring that helps you monitor their progress through the funnel and intervene at just the right time. 

Nurture Leads With Drip Campaigns 

Drip campaigns are email sequences used to stay in touch with prospects as they move through the sales funnel. These emails may be triggered by specific characteristics, specific locations of the lead within the different stages of your sales funnel, or through specific actions the lead takes. In short, a strategy that includes drip campaigns provides a series of emails with relevant content to a lead over a period of time - with the messaging tailored to appeal to the lead based on where they are in their buyer's journey.

Of course, one email sequence by itself could never cover all the customer segments you want to interact with. That's why your sales and marketing teams must put their heads together and develop your core buyer personas — and perhaps variations on each persona, depending on how deep you want to drill down. When your teams are in alignment on this, your drip campaigns will be much more targeted and effective as they will align to both your specific buyer personas and where each lead is within the buyer’s journey.
Some examples of drip campaigns include:
  • Sign-up sequences. Once a prospect signs up for a newsletter or exchanges contact info for a free e-book, this email sequence would welcome them to the company, provide them with a series of relevant digital gifts, and present easy CTAs for them to do (like following your company on social media). This sequence helps set expectations for your communications with them and provides them with small bites of information that should be useful and relevant to them.
  • Pre- and post-webinar sequences. Before a webinar takes place, you can send out a sequence to those prospects who signed up for it, generating excitement and offering them a preview of the useful information they'll learn. Afterward, you can send out at least a couple of different sequences depending on whether prospects did or didn't attend the webinar. For example, your sequence for those who attended could include key takeaways and next steps, while your sequence for those who didn't attend could include a recording of the webinar, along with a way to learn more about your offering without having to watch the entire video.
  • E-commerce sequences. This is a very common type of drip campaign. The idea is to target visitors to your e-commerce website and send out sequences based on the products they looked at, and whether they abandoned their shopping cart before purchasing. These emails often include discount offers or other money-saving incentives that encourage prospects to come back to the site and seal the deal.
There are many other types of drip campaigns, but the ones listed above give you an idea of what they may involve and how they can help prospects progress through their buyer's journey. The main strategy is to provide relevant content to each lead based on where they most likely are within their own personal buyer’s journey with your offering.

Use CRM Lead Scoring To Convert Leads

Lead scoring is an objective ranking of sales prospects and leads according to factors like interest level and sales-readiness. Your team members may not be able to read prospects' minds, but a well-designed lead-scoring system is the next best thing.

The main purpose of lead scoring is to help your sales team prioritize which prospects they should spend their time on, and which ones need to be nurtured a bit more before reaching out. There are all sorts of criteria, ranging from explicit factors like the prospect's industry, company, or job title, to implicit considerations like number of web pages visited, frequency of site visits, materials accessed or downloaded, etc. Most lead scoring systems function on some type of base scale, like from 1-10 or 1-100 — or more specifically, several scales of 1-10 that add up to an overall score for each lead.

The important thing is that everyone in sales and marketing agrees on the lead scoring criteria and then sticks to it. Of course, the best way to make this happen is to develop the lead scoring criteria together, across both departments. Then once the system is in place, scores can be calculated and tracked across your CRM and marketing automation platforms (such as HubSpot or Salesforce). Everyone has insight into each lead's score and can take appropriate action as needed.

It's true that it takes some effort on the front end to integrate marketing automation and your CRM, set up drip campaigns, and develop and implement a workable lead-scoring system. However, if you're willing to put in the work, and if your sales and marketing teams are willing to work together, then those tools will provide your company with long-term benefits. You'll truly be working smarter, not harder, and your sales performance will improve accordingly. It’s all about intentionality, action, and accountability - putting in the hard work up front to make your entire sales process more streamlined and effective.

Learn More

A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in a new book called Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources.

5 Sales Tech Challenges When Hosting VirtualĀ  Meetings

9/28/2020

 
Reps Face New Sales Tech Challenges Associated with Virtual Meetings
New trends in virtual meetings have given rise to sales tech challenges for many teams. In March 2020, Zoom saw more than 20 million new users download their mobile app. While the Work From Home (WFH) business model has been gaining traction for years, the current socio-political climate radically sped up the advent of technology like video conferencing. At the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, more than 300 million people participate in Zoom meetings every day. Add that to the immense number of people who use rival services such as Google Hangouts/ Meet, and you have a major shift in global business practices. 

That level of explosive growth isn't without problems, though. With so many first-time users adopting this new technology, things are bound to go wrong. Tech issues and sales meeting challenges are likely to arise. Here are five sales tech challenges that I see my clients struggle with every week, along with instructions on how to solve them.  

1. Attendees Click the Wrong Meeting Link 

​Google's entire suite of products is built on user experience. They have led the renaissance of easy-to-use applications that integrate seamlessly with one another. For the most part, it makes life much easier for the end user. Sometimes, Google's quality-of-life updates can be intrusive, and create a sales tech challenges.  

Businesses hosted through Gmail who choose to integrate with an enterprise platform like Outlook are subject to Google Meet/Hangout links where they might not want them. Google automatically embeds a link to their Meet/Hangout application in email and Google's calendar. Meet was formerly known as Google Hangouts, but over the summer of 2020, Gmail was upgraded to include additional video conferencing functionality, and thus Meet was born. 

Because Google automatically injects the embedded link into emails for enterprise users, people who you've invited to your Zoom sales meeting might be confused. Instead of clicking the Zoom link in their email, they click the embedded Meet/Hangout link instead. This link correlates to your Google calendar and is dependent on it. No matter how clear you make it in the body of the email, there will still be clients that click the embedded link anyway. Fortunately there is a fix.

It requires your business's Gmail administrator to adjust a setting in your Google calendar to prevent Google from automatically embedding the link across your G Suite. If your business is smaller in scale and you aren't using an enterprise account, you can turn this feature off yourself by going into your calendar settings and turning off the "Automatically add Google Meet video conferences to events I create" option in your calendar. 

2. Zoom Only Allows the Host to Share Their Screen

Being able to share what's on your screen is an important part of a virtual sales meeting. To implement a truly functional WFH model, your video conferencing platform has to foster productivity. By default, Zoom only allows the sales meeting's host to share what's on his/her device screen, however. This information can include: 
  • The user's full mobile or desktop screen 
  • A customized, partial view of their screen
  • Audio files only 
  • Content routed from an external camera
  • Other user-defined applications 

Fortunately, there is an extremely easy fix to this sales tech challenge, allowing everyone in the meeting to share screen content. To allow multiple users to share the contents of their screen, the meeting host must click the up arrow icon on the right side of the screen. This will open a menu where the host can select the "Multiple participants can share simultaneously," option.  

It should be noted that this is a change to the default option, which is set up so that only the host can share. Clicking a simple radio button located below the previous option allows the meeting attendees to share their content as well. 

3. Time Zone Confusion Creates Sales Tech Challenges

Large, multinational companies may have sales meetings that involve participants from all over the globe. That means participants operating out of different time zones. 

For some users, time zone conversion can be a painful, time-consuming process that involves consulting an outside source and then doing the math manually. For default Google users, it involves setting up a secondary time zone for each invite that has international attendees. That's where plugins come into play. 

Plugin calendar apps like Calendly or Acuity integrate easily with your G Suite, and provide valuable time zone information for your sales meetings by default. These extensions allow for easier time zone access, such as rolling over an attendee's name to show information, including time zone. 

For example, with Acuity integration, you simply click on the appointment in your Google calendar to see each attendee's time zone. The initial time investment that it takes 
to set up plugins like these are more than worth it given their overall convenience and effectiveness at solving this sales tech challenge. 

4. Solve Tech Issues by Enabling Advanced Functionality Tools

Add-ons like Calendly greatly augment what you're able to do with your video conferencing platform, helping you overcome multiple sales tech challenges at once. The basic version of Calendly includes free meeting scheduling functions, while their premium service allows users to do much more. 

Using Calendly's advanced features allows hosts to embed a link right on their website that allows potential clients to set up a meeting without having to go through an additional platform to initiate contact. Calendly also allows you to set up PayPal or Stripe payment options within the video conference itself, allowing for functional, results-driven sales meetings. 

Each new meeting type that the host sets up will walk them through a checklist of options for their prospective meeting, allowing them to easily initiate advanced features like these.  

5. Make Video Conferencing More Secure

Users worldwide have made a big deal out of the potential security issues inherent to free-to-use platforms like Zoom, and with good reason. Those security threats have introduced a new term into our collective vernacular: Zoombombing.

Sales people deal with sensitive information on a regular basis. The integrity of our customers' information and our internal communications is essential. Video conferencing, however, has become a modern-day necessity. What can users do to overcome this specific sales tech challenge?

While both Google and Zoom have added additional layers of encryption over the last few months, as well as unique meeting invite codes, Zoom users have a frontline defense they can proactively employ. Before starting a meeting, users can log in and access their settings. Under advanced options there is a setting to enable a virtual waiting room. This allows the meeting's host to pre-screen people attempting to join the meeting. 

Iron Out the Kinks

As with any new technology, there are millions of unanticipated issues that will inevitably arise. With the WFH business model, sales people worldwide are experiencing a major operational shift that will affect the industry as a whole. Experience is the best teacher available, even as we all try to figure out sales tech challenges together. Fortunately, each of the video conferencing platforms currently on the market are customizable, designed with the end user in mind.

For more tips, tricks and insights on videoconferencing and the evolving sales environment, sign up for our newsletter, or visit our website for webinars and other valuable business resources. 

    Meet  Me

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    I’m Karl Becker and I help individuals and organizations improve how they sell. My focus is on clear, concise, actionable solutions.

    In short, I'll show you how to increase performance and generate more revenue.

    This blog shares approaches, tools, and ideas that I have seen create success.

    If you’re interested in discussing anything, please reach out.
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