We love sales and marketing automation. Cutting repetitive tasks out of the day so you can accomplish the same volume of work in less time fires us up.
Automation opens the door to increased productivity, which equals more deals and revenue. It can also create an environment where you spend less time working on menial tasks and more time doing the things that actually move the needle in a meaningful way.
Either way, it’s a win-win.
As we dive into this topic, it's important to understand that while automation is a valuable tool that can help you streamline your marketing and sales efforts, it's only as valuable as the people and systems you have in place.
If you’re working with a CRM, you have a valuable tool that can help you organize information about prospects and customers that you can then segment and use as triggers to deliver a specific message to the correct person at the right time.
We have seen multiple cases where a company may have a CRM but has failed to update its customer information. They might still utilize automation and automation tools, but their capabilities are much more limited than if they had a more robust record-keeping process.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I wanted to talk about a few items that can be automated. These are strategies that we’ve used at various levels and have seen succeed.
Follow-Ups
Follow-ups might arguably be the easiest “task” to automate, and the results can be huge.
This article from Zoominfo suggests that 50% of sales happen after the
5th follow-up, but most reps give up after just one follow-up attempt. The same article suggests that emails receive almost twice as many responses as phone calls, so setting up an automated follow-up cadence seems like a no-brainer.
One area specifically we like to automate are the touch points after a prospect has received a proposal.
A prospect that communicates directly after their proposal is received is the ideal scenario, but that doesn't always happen. To avoid the silent treatment after a proposal has been sent to a contact we have used this framework:
Trigger:
Proposal Sent
Delay:
Set number of days (varies based on sales rep’s preferences)
Email:
Follow-up email referencing specific details
Delay:
Another variable time delay
Email:
2nd follow-up.
The pattern can keep going, but you get the idea. In this case, sending a client a proposal is the trigger that enrolls them into an automated workflow. That workflow then continues to reach out to the prospect on behalf of the sales rep until the rep either hears back from the prospect or doesn’t. In this particular case after a certain number of attempts, the members of the sales team will follow up with calls, and eventually, they’ll mark the deal cold or lost if they are unable to reestablish contact.
Follow-ups can be time-consuming and repetitive for a sales team so they often get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list, especially when a sales team is busy. We’ve seen open rates on follow-up emails reach between 60-70% and at one company we’ve worked with sales reps who have adopted automated techniques and have seen their close rates increase by up to 10%.
2. Prospecting
I want to start this section off by saying that I do not believe that all
prospecting should be automated. I’m sure everyone has received hundreds if not thousands of unsolicited emails that are immediately identifiable as a template with very little thought or effort put into the outreach.
To some extent, prospecting is a numbers game, but we’ve seen increased levels of success when authentic, honest effort is combined with automation.
We suggest researching and writing two unique and compelling outreach emails used in some combination with a phone call before automating.
That might look something like this:
Unique
contact: Cold Email
Unique
contact: Phone Call
Unique
contact: Unique follow-up email
Trigger:
Enroll in a prospecting sequence
Delay:
set number of days
Email:
automated follow-up
Delay:
set number of days
This can go on and on, but once again, you get the idea. For me, after attempting contact with a few well-thought-out specific touches at the forefront you do a lot of the heavy lifting. If your prospect takes the time to read those emails or listen to your voicemail, the individual effort will shine through. If at that point they haven’t responded the automation keeps you at the top of their mind.
Now, I’m sure plenty of people will have their own opinions about whether or not this is the right strategy, but as the saying goes, there is more than one way to skin a cat. This is just one example of a prospecting sequence that we’ve seen work. I very much encourage you to take this framework and make it your own.
3. Lead Nurturing:
Lead nurturing is probably the most obvious from a marketing standpoint. The only limit to lead nurturing automation is your imagination, so I’m not going to provide any frameworks for this example.
Instead, I’m going to keep this high level.
If you’re in marketing, you likely have a funnel. At the top of the funnel, you are trying to attract leads with some kind of content that will answer a valuable question for your audience. The idea is that your content will be so valuable that your audience will provide you with their email, or some other piece of information that will allow you to communicate directly with them.
This is where automation comes in. Once this person has shared that they are interested in your products are services, you likely have more content that they might find helpful to solve the specific challenge that they are facing. Marketing automation allows you to show them that content in the ways that they want to consume them.
It's up to you to decide what content to create for your funnel and what content to show contacts and when, but here is an example:
Say you run a B2B company that sells construction supplies. A contact from a construction company downloads your product catalog and signs up for your mailing list. From there, your marketing automation system sends out a welcome email asking them specifically which of your product verticals they care about the most.
If they respond, your system can send them the information they requested the most. If they don’t respond, you can set up triggers that will allow you to curate the content they see based on how they interact with your regular mailings. After a certain amount of time and interactions, you’ll be able to start to build a pattern, and eventually, an automated lead scoring system can convert this person from a prospect into a marketing-qualified lead and assign them to the correct salesperson.
Again, this is just an example. How you automate your lead nurture sequence heavily depends on multiple factors, including your marketing and sales processes, your company’s goals, and your imagination.
4. Re-engagement:
We’ve used re-engagement both on the sales and marketing sides, but one case, in particular, stands out to me. In looking through a sales representative’s pipeline I noticed had a lot of deals from previous years that had gone cold. To his knowledge the contacts were still looking for the company’s services, they just hadn’t made a decision yet.
Those seemed like they might be some low-hanging fruit for him as he approached the end of the year, so I asked what his process was for following up on those deals after they had gone cold.
He reached over, grabbed a stack of papers off of his desk, and said that was the pile from the last two years that he wanted to reach out to again, but just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
Automate re-engagement.
It was crazy to me that stack of papers had been sitting on his desk for literal YEARS just waiting for some action, but it turns out this is more common than you want to believe.
In this guy’s case, he was having his best year ever. He had landed some big accounts that were drawing most of his focus and he was happy, as he should have been. But he had already put the work in to put these proposals together, he just didn’t have the time to perform tasks that to him felt weren’t providing value for the effort.
Our solution to his problem was very simple. We set up an automatic email that would go out several months after his contacts had received their proposals if he hadn’t heard from them yet. The email would ask them if they had found another vendor to do the job, and ask if their requirements were still the same.
And just like that, he was re-engaging contacts without manually sending emials or making calls. This is a very new experiment for us, so I’ll report back once we have some numbers to gauge its effectiveness. The important thing is, though that if he closes any of these deals it will be worth the small amount of time he invested in getting his process right.
Additional Thoughts
It may seem like some of the tools we discussed are going to be more applicable to some industries than they are in others. That may be the case, but almost every business can benefit from some kind of automation tool.
B2B businesses with long sales cycles can especially benefit from automating touches. If a sale takes months or even years to go from start to finish, taking the time to understand the buyer's journey and deliver timely content can be beneficial, especially if you are relying on your team to perform that outreach manually.
We are all human and sometimes forget, or other tasks might steal our time and attention.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is only limited by the tools you have and your imagination. As I stated to start this post, we love Marketing Automation. Love it. But it's also important that automation is just one part of your organization, and while you might be able to make your team more effective, business is about people. No matter what product or service you sell your organization is comprised of people who are trying to help other people solve problems. Automation is a great way to empower the people in your organization to improve efficiencies and help achieve your goals.
If you want to start automating, but need some help, check out this article and contact us today to learn more.
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