C-suite executives at B2B healthcare, insurance, and technology companies are presented with new marketing options regularly, but they are often left wondering what the benefits are to investing in these new marketing tools. They also may be wondering, “Does marketing automation help lead to more sales?” or “What does it even mean?”
A simple explanation: marketing automation software is the tool that unites the sales and marketing aspects of a business. While many B2B businesses treat marketing and sales as independent areas, Katherine Dollar’s article “4 Ways Marketing Automation Helps the B2B Sales Process” describes how effectively utilizing marketing automation can help you merge these two operations and achieve the bigger goal of turning website visitors into actual paying customers.
Marketing automation helps you with the following in the B2B sales process:
- This automation software can improve your data collection abilities and help you create web-visitor profiles. Providing content good enough to get visitors to give you information like their title, company, and even budget equips you with profiles good enough to enable effective conversations with potential customers.
- Creating high quality content on a variety of topics can also help automation software segment web visitors into lists based on their preferences and interests. The data from these lists helps marketers single out higher-potential buyers through targeted emails and can help keep people who are qualified in your visitor pool.
- Automation can even reduce the need for cold-calling in sales by giving visitors ample opportunities to indicate they’re ready for the next step throughout their web visit—sales reps then only have to review the potential buyer’s information on the website and begin the conversation.
Marketing automation is a trend that’s here to stay, and the functionality of such software programs is continuing to improve as companies continue adding new features and capabilities to their programs. Instead of waiting to begin integrating, start improving your marketing and sales connectivity and building your customer relationship management system (CRM). The more complicated the software gets, the more difficult it is to implement.
Scott Public Relations will continue to monitor this trend and provide updates, but we want to hear from you! Do you use marketing automation software? If so, do you find that it helps you streamline your B2B sales process? Submit a comment or share with us on our social media pages by clicking one of the links below.
If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.
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