This is the blog transcript of our video “How to Use Marketing Automation to Increase Sales”. If you’d like to see more of our videos, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
Marketing automation has become popular with marketers and business owners alike but a lot of sales people aren’t using it correctly – some of them not at all. And they might be losing business as a result.
Hey everyone, I’m Ian Campbell, CEO of Mission Suite. Before we jump into today’s video, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been helping Mission Suite clients build marketing automation campaigns that help them generate leads and close business. If you’re watching this video, odds are that you know that marketing automation can be hugely powerful to help you grow your business from a marketing perspective.
But what about when it comes to more traditional selling?
There are so many ways that you can use marketing automation to drive your sales forward, from prospecting to nurturing your sales prospects to moving those prospects through the different stages of your sales funnel.
First thing’s first, using marketing automation in your prospecting efforts.
There are two key things that I’ve found really impact my prospecting efforts, regardless of automation: sending follow up emails and making follow up phone calls. Every business relationship that I’ve ever forged has come down to those two things. But can they really be automated?
Well the answer here is…kind of.
Let’s start with the follow up emails.
Emails like this are a perfect use for marketing automation in selling because, when you think about it, about 95% of the follow up emails you send are variations of the same email – especially when it comes to prospecting.
If you met the person, it’s always “hey it was great to meet you, I’d love to get together again, what does your calendar look like?”
If you didn’t meet or speak to the person but rather got their information from an associate of theirs it’s always “hey your associate said I should be speaking with you about xyz and I’d love to talk more – are you available for a brief phone call?”
Sometimes we add personal notes to make ourselves feel a bit more engaged in the process but, at the end of the day, it’s always the same.
So why not automate that email going out? You can still add personalization to the email (like placeholders for first name, company name, and other things like that) so it feels personal.
And the biggest thing to remember is that they don’t know that every other prospect of yours is getting the same email so it doesn’t feel automated or impersonal to them.
Next, follow up phone calls.
So obviously you can’t automate the phone call itself. You can automate voicemail drops but that’s not really that effective if you’re really trying to build a relationship with someone.
What you can automate, though, is the reminder that you receive to make that follow up phone call.
How many times have you let a phone call slip through the cracks, or worse, outright forget to follow up completely, and it cost you a deal. I can tell you that it’s happened to me more times than I care to admit.
When I finally remembered that I was supposed to be following up with a contact and made the call, I would get “oh, we didn’t hear from you in time and now we’re working with someone else”. Every time I heard that statement, it would kill me!
So I started making sure that I got reminders to follow up with people when I needed to so that I would at least remember it needed to get done. I’ll admit that whether I did it or not was sometimes a different story but at least it wasn’t for lack of memory!
With marketing automation tools, you can schedule automatic reminders to follow up with people.
Personally, I like to get a reminder three business days after my initial email goes out so I set up that rule in my system and I get an email when it’s time to make the call.
I know that it might feel impersonal, and I get that might feel like a deterrent. But when I started automating these two things alone, the number of sales meetings I got from my prospecting efforts went up by 30%!
You can’t argue with those numbers – it’s gotta at least be worth trying, right?
Are you automating any of your follow up now? Give me a like if you are, and let me know in the comments how it’s worked for you.
In addition to follow up, you can also automate sending supporting content to people based on where they are in the sales cycle.
Now this does get a bit into the “marketing” side of marketing automation but it’s an important part of the sales process.
When you think about it, there’s almost always a point in every stage of your sales where you say something to the effect of “I’ll send that off after we get off the phone” or “when I get back to the office”. And, again, more often than not, it’s the same thing!
Now you’re relying on your own memory to get something done again and any time you do that, you’re introducing the potential for human error.
Automating those steps makes sure that you don’t forget to send something out that you said you would. It helps you maintain the level of trust that you spent a lot of time building. Why wouldn’t you use it?
Mission Suite is particularly well suited to help you automate these types of sales steps so if you want to check out how it could work for you in your business, check out the description of this video for a link to sign up for one of our demo webinars.
Hey I hope you got something out of this video. And if you did, go ahead and give it a thumbs up and maybe a share so that others can see it too. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos and while you’re at it, check out these videos too!
We’ll see you next time around!