One of the biggest pain points for B2B marketers is the transition between marketing and sales. In an inefficient system, siloed marketing and CRM databases don’t communicate, and neither do the people who use them. Instead of being carried seamlessly from the marketing funnel to the sales department in a comfortable transition, some leads drop through without sufficient notice or enough information to provide that lead with the care they deserve.
What’s your current cost per lead, and how would it change if you earned 20 percent more qualified sales opportunities? According to the International Data Group, that’s what B2B marketers achieve when they get an assist from marketing automation to connect sales and marketing databases. Database marketing technology is no longer in the early-adopter stage at this point; it’s an essential part of streamlining your sales pipeline.
Here’s where that jump in opportunities comes from.
Work Less, Learn More
Instead of wasting the sales team’s time tracking down vital information about a sales-ready lead, the information is there at their fingertips as part of their CRM data. On its side, marketers no longer need to rummage through the CRM to unearth insights about the customer base as that data flows the other direction too, allowing marketers to develop more accurate customer personas. How much more productive can your marketing efforts be when you’re able to focus on the creative aspects of it instead of fact-finding? How much more effective is your sales team when every lead that comes to them has a wealth of information attached?
Set and Forget
The beauty of automation is that you can set it to handle routine tasks and walk away from it as it does its work. Conventional email marketing tools allow for a certain amount of autonomous functioning, but they don’t automatically allow data to flow between your sales and marketing systems. Manually synchronizing your CRM and marketing databases is another time-sink, but with marketing database services that automate the process, you don’t have to shepherd leads through the gate. Automation tracks what leads do and traces their progress through the marketing pipeline, then makes that progress visible to both sales and marketing without extra steps.
Lead Scoring for Sales Readiness
When your sales department knows which leads are sales ready, team members are able to act right away to cater to your new customers. When marketers know what leads need to become sales-ready, they’re able to deliver the customized content that walks them closer to buying decisions. Lead scoring is the solution for both sides of the aisle, automatically alerting sales when a lead reaches sales readiness and sending not-yet-ready leads through nurture programs. Database services that allow you to deliver personalized service to each prospect and customer through lead scoring offer a significant advantage over guesswork. Scoring also eliminates wasted time and effort spent on non-leads.
Outstanding Analytics
Data makes the difference for marketers who want to have concrete, quantifiable answers about their marketplace. By giving marketing and sales access to analytics that pertain to both, database marketing systems allow users far greater insight into what their audiences need. Here’s where automation shines: It effortlessly does the work of a whole cadre of interns armed with spreadsheets, instantly comparing data over time, ROI, attribution, and other KPIs. Insight is incredibly valuable to both sides of the fence, and it’s easier to come by with automated database services.
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