Marketing Automation requires resource, money and time to set up. But, effective Marketing Automation means businesses benefit from shorter sales cycles, more deals and higher-value deals. In automating repetitive tasks, a business saves resource, money and time.
Here are 4 key signs that each indicate your business is ready for Marketing Automation;
- You hear customer services, sales, or marketing saying the same things over and over again on the phone to prospects and customers.
- You suspect the business may be losing deals due to 'overwhelm'. You've heard members of the marketing, sales & customer service teams tell you they're struggling to respond in a timely manner to all the enquiries coming in.
- Your sales team have a clearly defined sales process that shows potential for automation. Your sales team may be asking to send out bulk emails to your database.
- You track your leads and know what stage of the sales process they're at (whether that's using a CRM or other tools like Excel Spreadsheets).
"This is helpful. This said, I don’t think my company is ready for marketing automation. What should I do?"
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Concerned the business does not have a clear understanding of leads, and where these sit?
Ask your team to build a weekly and monthly sales funnel report, describing:
- Traffic to Website
- Email Sign Ups
- Leads Passed to Sales
- Unqualified Leads
- Opted In Leads
- Counts of Leads That Meet Your Buyer Personas
- Meetings
- Opportunities Open and Created
- Opportunities Closed/Won and Closed Lost
Having this data is always a good idea and you can start tracking the ROI of content, website, and lead improvements even before Marketing Automation is brought on.
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Concerned the business does not have a clear sales process?
Take the opportunity to plot your customer's journey, against the sales' team's activities. Use the plotted map to identify areas that may require improvement, or an activity.
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Concerned you may not have enough content?
Undertake a content audit so you can clearly see what content the business has created. It may be a lot more than you think: especially when you consider opportunities for repurposing content and adapting it for another channel.
- Is there content the sales team or customer service team use that the marketing team may not be aware of? There may a wealth of content in another department jus waiting to be used!
- Formalise the content audit. Ask the marketing team to list the content that has been created, detailing the persona it suits, the medium it's currently in, the stage of the buyer's journey it's relevant to and it's location (i.e. URL or location on a shared drive).