Sales and Marketing Automation to Handle More Leads

Abe Dearmer

Jan 11, 2021

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8 min read

CRM

Sales and marketing reps are always busy - that's a known fact. Their time is usually split between completing routine tasks and more important customer-facing ones. Wouldn't it be more time-efficient to have someone else complete the more mundane tasks so reps have free time to focus on just what's important?

With superior automation facilities available, it is now easily possible to free up sales and marketing reps' time and divert the work to a system that can take care of repetitive managerial tasks. Automation tools are also a big step towards increasing revenue by focusing on lead generation and nurturing, helping sales and marketing reps reach their ultimate goal.

Here are some effective and time-efficient ways that automation tools can help sales and marketing reps with handling more leads.

Always keep your funnel full

Without a good amount of leads in your sales funnel how can you nurture them to fruition? This is why one of the main roles of sales and marketing reps is to keep collecting leads and keep the funnel full. This task takes a lot of effort on both the teams' parts, but imagine if you could have the ability to fill your funnel without having to do so manually or in a time-consuming fashion?

Efficient automation tools these days have the capability to generate a steady flow of qualified leads using newsletters, personalised email marketing, sales calls, web popups, and more - all automated for your convenience!

Such sales and marketing automation systems can help do these tasks for your reps with the addition of better accuracy and avoidance of any human error. Collect more leads in your sales funnel, as the higher amount of qualified leads you have, the more sales you'll make.

Lead segmentation and nurturing

Get the ability to have powerful and impactful lead nurturing with the use of amazing automation capabilities. Lead segmentation helps divide them based on link clicks, web browsing activity, email opens, custom tags, and more. This segmentation is important so you can target the leads more effectively by understanding where they are at in their buying journey - are they still just browsing and not yet ready to make a purchase? Are they considering a purchase? Or are they ready to make the decision and go ahead with the purchase?

Sales teams will have the ability to track and access any amount of required data, to segment, target, and fast track leads through the sales funnel. Once you've gauged the interest level, it is easier to nurture the leads in a way that they can be effectively moved on to the next step.

Another benefit of automation for lead nurturing is the ability to add personalisation to your email marketing campaigns. You will be able to completely customise and tailor your messages to pique specific interests of different segments, as well as have the complete required knowledge of their buyer's journey. Automation can also help with scheduling emails to send at specific times without the rep having to stay actively engaged to complete the task on time. This helps you set a regular rhythm for your email marketing and newsletters so you don't send too many and very few, and ensure you always capture your lead's interest.

Qualifying the right leads

You would think that qualifying leads is a very long and time-consuming task. Well, if done manually then yes, but if done with the help of an automation tool then no. Ensuring that your leads qualify means checking if the lead is a good fit for your company and how close or far it is from making a purchase.

To do this, the marketing teams usually set parameters that can be used at every stage of the lead qualification process or for each kind of buyer persona. This marketing material is sent to the sales teams so they can subsequently use it with automated lead scoring as well as segmentation capabilities.

Get a hold on your marketing

Marketing automation tools provide reps the capability to control their marketing strategy with ease. The first and foremost advantage is the insight that marketing teams can get when using such a tool and they also have access to each and every bit of required data at the tap of a button.

Reps will also have a bird's eye view of each lead and how the marketing efforts through various channels are working to engage with them. Having this available at hand allows the team to accordingly change and alter the strategy for improvements so it has the right impact on leads to help them move forward.

Increase the Return on Investment

The main use of getting an automation system is to help your marketing and sales reps get more time to focus on their main roles. The idea is for the automation to set your processes up for success and give reps time to work on leads and ultimately increase the Return on Investment.

Automation can increase the potential to work on closing sales and nurturing leads with a cost-effective solution for success. The fact that you get the ability to do more with a few efficient resources and in lesser time than before already gives you an advantage to increase your ROI.

Better your productivity

Increased productivity is one of the biggest advantages of getting automation tools for your business. With several tasks automated, your sales and marketing reps should have more free time to focus on just what is important. No more manually filling out customer data, creating analytical graphs, one by one cleaning repetitive data, and other such time-consuming tasks!

See a marked improvement in productivity from both your teams after you eliminate the need for them to do tasks that can be handled for them without their intervention. Automation tools will help your sales and marketing reps with lead collection, vetting, and nurturing, so they can better use their time on tasks that help in closing the sale.

Ensure sales and marketing teams are on the same page

It is very important for the sales and marketing teams to be on the same page and have access to the same tools and resources as each other. The ability to handle leads the right way will only be possible when each team has insight into the same knowledge and are able to complete their sales and marketing automation tasks on one platform.

Having too many different platforms or separate tools for each team to use, will create confusion and hinder effective collaboration. Avoid the occurrence of hand-offs between the two teams and ensure they are handling all their leads, tasks, and customers in one place to speed up the processes and maximise work.

Using the right sales and marketing automation tools for your business

Finding the right sales and marketing automation tools for your business is imperative to make the above processes work efficiently and seamlessly. Pick a Customer Relationship Management platform that offers several automaton features and works as an all in one system. There are several options available in the market, but the best choice for you will be a CRM that ticks all the boxes on your list of automation requirements.

That along with the tips outlined above, you will be able to get a smooth sailing ship with extremely few to no hiccups along the way!

FIVE CRM is one such scalable software that allows you to get just the features you need. Get automation features for lead nurturing, project management, contact and data management, marketing, sales telephony, and much more.

Michael King says...

"I can’t think of a time where a client has requested something that we weren’t able to do with FiveCRM. Unlike most systems, it has a lot of flexibility."

Managing Director, Senior Response

JANE HUSBANDS SAYS...

“Each client, and each of their campaigns, has its own unique specifications. We essentially needed to set up mini CRMs on one platform to meet those requirements.”