Turbocharge Your Sales Cycle with Marketing Automation

The faster is your sales cycle, the more revenue you hope to accrue.

However, how do you move your sales cycle up a gear? One of the way is to supercharge it by implementing marketing automation.

Here are five ways you can turbocharge your sales using marketing automation:

• Score Leads for Buyer Readiness
  Traditionally, marketers create lead scoring systems on the basis of implicit buying signals – such as form submissions that enable you to evaluate a lead’s interest level before passing it to sales. These are further filtered using demographic parameters to ensure better prioritization. However, it’s time to move over your traditional lead scoring systems. Since there are more than 4 people involved in every B2B buying process, you need to consider both lead and account readiness.

Here’s what you should do:

• Setup a custom score field in Marketo for Account Readiness Score
• Group your leads in different segments based on their influence in the buying decision process. These groups can be product marketing, marketing, purchase, technology and top executives.
• In your existing behavioral lead scoring smart campaigns, start assigning scores to Account Readiness, based on lead segments. So your campaign would look like this:

• Create a view in Salesforce for your Reps, where they can see both Lead Score and Account Readiness Score, allowing them to prioritize leads accordingly. You can also choose to show columns for demographic score and behavioral score, to help your Sales team.

• Leverage Sales Insights
  Marketo allows you to setup flames and stars based on scoring parameters. After you enable Sales Insights from Admin section, you can choose which scores to use for depicting stars and flames. Going by the books, stars are used for demographic score and flames are used for behavior score. However, you need to ensure that you set the right threshold and it’s always better to be conservative when assigning stars and flames.

• Create Marketo Sales Insight Emails
  Marketo allows you to create emails which are available inside Salesforce. When building an email in Marketo, you can simply go to Settings and check the option for ‘Sales Insight Email’. This would ensure that Marketo becomes your single system of emails for Sales Reps. Moreover, managing email content and setting up detailed reporting is easier in Marketo, as compared to Salesforce.

• Train Sales Reps to Leverage Interesting Moments
  On the basis of lead activity, setup Interesting Moments inside Marketo. You don’t have to cover all the lead activity through this, but it’s important to cover the critical ones. So next time when your sales rep calls a prospect, they can check the recent lead activity and engage better. Also, it is critical that you train your sales team to go inside Marketo, look for a lead and then view its activity log. In some companies, sales team usually reaches out to marketing operations team, but some Marketo knowledge always comes handy.

• Build a Sales Farmer Program
  Referral is the greatest advantage that a sales rep can get. Sales Farming is a process where you assign reps to already won accounts. These reps focus on increasing your footprint within the same company, leveraging existing connections. For e.g., every time a rep closes a deal, he should send out an email from Marketo that goes out to all the other leads of the same account, telling them about the deal. This would increase the interest level of other teams, and improve your penetration within the company.

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Want to leverage marketing automation to shorten your sales cycle?

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