Marketing automation sets up the salesperson. It assumes something that traditional sales does not: buyers prefer self-service until they are ready to buy.
If you court your buyer too early, you can violate trust. It is intrusive and unsynced with how they would prefer to move through the process of buying.
At some point, a switch occurs. When the buyer feels ready, they move into engagement. Selling becomes easy at this point. The hard work beforehand is a process. The actual sale is an event. Create a personalized, predictable and relevant process and you create repeatable events for your business.
Here is the heavy lifting that marketing automation does before the event of a sale:
- Creates Awareness: The marketplace is saturated and noisy. Marketing automation gets past this noise by connecting with the buyer in an impactful and precise way based on their behaviors and preferences. It is targeted when a well-designed marketing strategy has been implemented.
- Educates: Assume you know much, much more than your buyer. You think about your product or service all the time. Your buyer is buying when they need something. There is a long list of items they have and you are one item in time and attention they are focused on. They want to learn as much as possible, preferably from you. Your marketing automation strategy should empower the buyer with knowledge which you have.
- Builds Trust: Your brand becomes part of the flesh and blood of your marketing automation system and touchpoints. Frequency helps to spotlight your brand. Insight and expertise positions you in the mind of the customer as the leader. They want to pick the leader. Effective marketing automation strategies build trust by positioning your leadership and your care by adding value as they are learning.
- Measures Interest: You can’t keep calling your unseen buyer. However, their digital body language is telling you many things if you can capture it and analyze it. You can see what content they are interested in, how they move through a decision tree and the level of interest they have ongoing. Scoring what is invisible and surfacing it for sales readies the conversation your company will eventually have.
- Qualifies Leads: If your expensive sales team is wasting time talking to people that will never buy, then it is a waste of resources and money. Allow your system to direct such uninterested prospects to some kind of referral nurturing campaign. The workload for your sales team can be focused and cut down by seeing your marketing automation system percolate with the most qualified leads.
- Positions The Sales Meeting: Imagine someone who is already sold. They are ready to do business with you. They know your value proposition and they trust you. This is the result of marketing automation executed well. Your buyer feels like they know you because of the hard work of your marketing automation processes.
There are two ways to sell – you call people or they call you. Calling people has natural limits. You can only do it so often. It is linear and inefficient. It takes manpower and will power.
People calling you can scale as a business process. It affords you better opportunities with higher levels of effectiveness.
Take a look at your selling process. Think through how it works and what you would want your buyer to experience. Imagine a process which connects personally and moves the buyer forward towards the sale.
What would stop you from implementing such a system?
