Sales enablement is an ongoing strategic process that supports sales teams with the right tools, resources, and skills to improve efficiency and drive higher revenue. As a result, B2B companies are investing heavily in sales enablement tools. But the challenge is that without a strong understanding of the people, processes, and enterprise-wide insights, you can still miss the mark. Fortunately, a few sales enablement best practices can set you on the right path to hitting your goals. 

Enabling sales: How to build an effective program 

Building any new strategy starts with goals. What do you hope to accomplish through sales enablement? Maybe it’s increasing revenue by a certain percentage or improving customer satisfaction. With these goals in mind, you can more effectively focus on the strategies and tools that help you get there. As you build your program, consider these five key areas. 

Sales enablement best practices: Know thy audience … define buyer personas

When improving sales enablement, always start with your audience by building personas. Why? Research finds that over half of organizations report higher-quality leads because they use personas. Moreover, 36% say that personas contributed to shorter sales cycles. And who doesn’t want shorter sales cycles, right? 

Here are a few tips for getting started: 

1. Complete updated research. Whether you have existing personas or you’re creating them for the very first time, you’ll want to update your research. Research can include customer surveys, sales team interviews, reviewing internal data, and more. And remember: what you think a customer wants and what they really want are often very different. 
2. Create persona profiles. With your research in hand, you can create (or refresh) personas with details such as background, demographics, challenges and frustrations, and more. 
3. Iterate and refine. Customer needs are a moving target, and so are personas. As a result, you’ll want to periodically review, update research, and align to ensure you’re positioned to get the best results from your content and sales efforts. 

If you want more tips and examples, we wrote a complete guide about creating buyer personas that increase ROI. And once you create your personas, you’ll want to design more targeted materials throughout the audience’s entire journey to more effectively support sales. 

Sales enablement best practices: Build content around the buyer journey

Personalization … it’s critical, isn’t it? Yeah, you probably know that already. But it’s also an important part of sales enablement. 

Personalization helps create serendipitous experiences that build connection and engagement and make it easier for sales to do their job. 

But here’s the tricky part: You need the ability to anticipate the audience’s needs at every turn, and doing that at scale is hard without a sales enablement tool such as marketing automation. 

Marketing automation helps you provide the right content to the right person at the right moment. In other words, it helps you provide relevant resources at every turn in the customer’s journey. Here’s an example: 

Awareness. Imagine that a prospect wants to improve sales enablement (sound familiar!?). As a result, they research how to best align content with a buyer’s journey. Blog posts, eBooks, and other resources about solving this challenge might be consumed. 

Consideration. The customer has decided to leverage marketing automation, but with so many potential solutions, they read case studies, white papers, and other resources to narrow down potential solutions. 

Decision. Finally, the customer is ready to make a decision. But first, they want to test potential solutions, so they schedule product demos. 

If you build content around every step in the buyer’s journey, you can help them as they move from awareness to decision, supporting the sales team and, hopefully, shortening the sales cycle. 

Sales enablement best practices: Create training and development 

Training and development become increasingly important as marketing develops buyers’ personas, shares them with sales, and aligns content to the buyer’s journey. When sales knows what marketing is doing, and vice versa, efforts organically become more aligned. And a by-product of that alignment is information sharing. 

For example, sales might share what types of objections they’re receiving from the various personas, and marketing can more effectively integrate that feedback into content along the buyer’s journey. As a result, objections will be addressed before a lead hits the sales workflow. 

Sales enablement best practices: Adopting the right tools 

A large part of sales enablement is the tools you use. Periodically, you’ll want to ask: Do our existing tools still serve us? 

Perhaps you use an email marketing provider, but it’s not as robust as it could be. Instead, you want a solution that helps you align with the customer journey through more personalized and relevant content. If so, you might consider adopting sales enablement tools, such as marketing automation. 

Marketing automation can also help with lead scoring by assigning scores based on a prospect’s interactions with content. Leads with higher scores are prioritized, making it far easier for sales teams to hit goals. 

Sales enablement best practices: Measure and optimize success

As you adopt best practices for sales enablement, you’ll want to ensure the strategies and tools are performing. And that requires sales enablement KPIs. Here are a few examples of what you might measure:

1. Sales cycle length. Is it speeding up or slowing down?
2. The number of closed deals. Is the number of deals that you’re closing increasing?
3. The size of deals. Are you growing the size of each deal? 
4. Retention rates. Are you retaining more of your customers, and equally important, are you cross-selling more relevant products and services? 

As time goes on, your goals might evolve. Once you hit a goal, consider adopting a new one or move the bar higher — then rinse and repeat. 

The right strategy, right tools, and right customers 

In the end, sales enablement is first and foremost about attitude. It’s a team approach to sales that gives everyone in the organization a support role in aligning resources to make the right sale to the right customer. Marketing plays an important role in ensuring the content and tools are used in a way that is relevant to each unique selling situation. And if you need help with more effectively aligning sales and marketing teams, we’ve got you covered. Check out how Act-On can help.

Integrating your CRM and MAP

Sales teams live and die by their CRM. And marketing teams depend on a solid marketing automation platform (MAP) to deliver personalized content at scale. When the two platforms work together, magic happens. (And by magic, we mean smooth handoffs.) 

A solid CRM – MAP integration requires two-way communication. You need a bidirectional integration to support full visibility into how a prospect interacts with marketing content and sales team members throughout their journey. Data has to pass in both directions, with no manual labor or spreadsheet uploads required. 

The sales team should be able to see how a potential customer has engaged with content in the past. Knowing what case studies they’ve read, which webinars they’ve attended, and what emails they tend to open will give them valuable insight into what matters most to this particular lead. They can structure their conversations and follow-up based on this intel. And real-time alerts keep salespeople informed of how their leads are engaging with the website, emails, and content as their conversations progress. 

Similarly, the marketing team should be able to see common CRM data like company size and deal status—because leads don’t stop engaging with marketing content once a sales conversation happens. Visibility into CRM data will help marketers segment and personalize content, such as delivering emails from their assigned sales rep. 

Some teams believe an all-in-one, mega-platform that provides both marketing automation and CRM capabilities is the easiest way to achieve this kind of visibility. But most sales and marketing experts agree that usually leads to one team compromising on what they need. That only increases tension, not alignment. 

Instead, marketing teams should find a MAP they love and sales teams should find the CRM that best meets their needs—including a robust, two-way integration.

Sales and Marketing Alignment in Action: Tech Integration

At manufacturing brand BinMaster, marketers use a native integration between their MAP and their Dynamics CRM to orchestrate automated email campaigns for new prospects—complete with dynamic insertion of the relevant salesperson’s photo, name, and contact info. 

Define “handback” processes and develop workflows

Defining MQLs, SALs, and SQLs, and implementing lead scoring, helps teams know when to hand off qualified leads from marketing to sales. But given the complexity of modern buying journeys, you also need to be prepared for leads to be “rejected” by sales and come back to marketing. 

Maybe a lead was given a setback by their buying committee, or simply wants to do more research on their own before talking with sales. Those leads shouldn’t be cast aside, but returned to marketing for ongoing engagement. When their circumstances change, they can find their way back through the funnel and, hopefully, reconnect with sales at the right time.

Make sure the right fields are available in your CRM to capture information from sales when this happens, and that the right workflows are set up in your MAP to re-engage those returned leads. Include a path for sharing feedback from sales to marketing, and a way for marketing to collect and analyze that feedback—hopefully improving the qualification and handoff process over time.

Build relationships—and empathy

Finally, marketing and sales teams need to spend some good old-fashioned time together and build some empathy. It’s good for the business, and it will make both teams better at their jobs.

Ideally, this starts at the top. When Udi Ledergor was CMO at Gong, he had a memorable take on how to predict his peers’ likelihood of success: whether or not they knew how their CRO took their coffee. His thesis was that sales and marketing leaders who spent time together and knew each other outside of executive meetings would build the rapport and trust needed to function as teammates, not adversaries. 

And even if weekly coffee dates within the C-suite aren’t a possibility, team members at every level of the organization can make an effort to build relationships across the sales and marketing divide. 

There is so much that each team can learn from one another. The sales team has daily conversations with would-be customers, and keeps their finger on the pulse of what messaging is resonating and what’s missing. The marketing team has a bigger-picture perspective on the industry as a whole, and keeps up with the latest research and trends that can help sales frame their conversations in a richer context.

But we get it—making friends can be awkward. So here are a few questions we’ve found can spark great conversations: 

• What slide in your presentation deck gives the buyer their “lightbulb moment”? 
• Which ones do you skip over, because they never seem to resonate?
• What statistic always seems to catch your prospect’s attention? 
• What case study is your favorite to share? Why?
• Which roles do you love to talk to most? Why? 
• What factor really seals the deal for prospects? 
• If you could wave a magic wand and have your leads understand one thing about our product, what would it be?

Get lunch (in-person or virtual). Listen in on calls. Ask for feedback after new products or features go to market. Work with leadership to create formal opportunities to collaborate, such as annual or quarterly kickoffs (remote, hybrid, or otherwise). 

You’ll get inspired, and your sales team will have a better understanding of how marketing is working their butts off to support them. 

Sales and marketing software alignment is worth the effort

Bottom line: Marketing and sales aren’t oil and water. They’re peanut butter and chocolate—both great on their own, but pure magic when they come together. Reaching alignment isn’t easy, but it’s absolutely worth it. 

How to align sales and marketing on ideal customer profiles and buyer personas

If you don’t already have a well-documented ideal customer profile (ICP) and easily accessible buyer personas, then your sales and marketing teams could be on radically different pages about who you’re all actually trying to reach. (And if you do have them, consider revisiting them on a regular basis to address and changes in strategy—and to keep them top-of-mind for all teams.)

Develop your ICP

Your ICP describes the firmographic details of the type of company you agree would be the best fit for your product or service. Industry, size, revenue—these are all quantitative data points that can inform your ICP. Align marketing and sales on your ICP to deliver a shared understanding of what kinds of leads you want to prioritize. Startups or enterprise orgs? Financial services or SaaS companies? 

Developing and documenting your ICP doesn’t mean you’ll only sell to or target one type of customer. But it helps every team prioritize their work and their budgets, and get better at their jobs. 

• BDRs can better prioritize their time when prospecting or conducting cold outreach.
• Demand gen marketers can strategically plan ad spend for targeted campaigns. 
• Content marketers can determine what kinds of case studies resonate, and produce more of them. 
• SDRs can become more adept and efficient in qualifying conversations.

With an ICP in place, you know the kind of companies you want to target. Then, you can narrow in on the individuals within those organizations with buyer personas.

Buyer personas

If an ICP describes a company, a buyer persona describes an individual working at that company—your actual human buyer. And your sales and marketing team should consider your buyer personas their best imaginary friends.

Buyer personas are fictional composites of your ideal customers, with details that make them feel real for your team. When done right, buyer personas are developed with market research, first hand experience, and customer listening—making them the ideal group project for marketing and sales teams. Marketers can provide industry research while salespeople can share insights from their daily conversations with actual buyers. 

Buyer personas usually include things like: 

• Fictionalized name and biography
• Demographics (gender, location, job title, experience level, etc.)
• Behavioral traits (including how they like to research and solve problems)
• Interests (what they care about, both inside and outside of work)
• Needs (what’s missing and what movitates them in their professional lives)
• Pain points (what stresses them out, keeps them up at night or gives them a headache every morning)

Most organizations have multiple personas, especially for products where purchasing decisions are shared among a team or committee. For example, you may have an executive decision-maker and an individual product user at the same company with significantly different motivators and pain points. 

Sales and marketing teams can use buyer personas to tailor content, conversations, and overall messaging. When a blog post or piece of sales collateral is crafted with a specific buyer persona in mind, it should make your buyer feel as though you understand them, you know their pain points, and you probably have the solution to their problem. 

How to align sales and marketing on goals, metrics, and definitions

Even if marketing and sales teams are perfectly aligned on their ICP and buyer personas, that doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing throughout the buying journey. Everyone needs to be speaking the same language and tracking the same metrics as leads are generated, nurtured, and progressed throughout the shared marketing sales funnel. 

Define MQLs and SQLs together

In most B2B companies, sales and marketing teams measure success not just by how many deals they close or new customers they acquire, but by the number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads), SALs (sales accepted leads) and/or SQLs (sales qualified leads) they generate each month or quarter. 

Revenue goals—and often individual bonuses—depend on outcomes like:

• Demand gen marketers generating a minimum number of MQLs
• Marketing teams handing off a certain amount of SQLs to the sales team
• SDRs following up with SALs within a certain timeframe

But often, sales and marketing teams don’t have a shared understanding of what constitutes an MQL, SAL, or SQL in the first place. So when overall revenue targets are missed, it becomes a hot topic of debate about who dropped the ball. That’s when you hear accusations about marketing handing off too few (or too many low-quality) leads, or sales failing to follow up on the leads generated by marketing.

Blame gets assigned, but without a shared vocabulary, actually solving problems and improving performance is nearly impossible. So it’s imperative for sales and marketing teams to get in the same room, get granular, and nail down what defines a lead at every stage of the funnel. 

To give you a head start, here’s the functional overview of each type of lead—and how they can be defined in detail: 

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)

MQLs are leads that the marketing team considers worthy of attention. You need to gather some specific level of information to assign this status, and this is where you can get down to brass tacks with sales: is first name and email enough to constitute an MQL? Or do you need the company name? What about company size? Do you want to exclude leads based on undesirable attributes, like belonging to an industry far outside your ICP, or using a @hotmail.com email? 

Sales accepted leads (SALs)

SALs are sales accepted leads, or MQLs that the sales team has received from marketing and considers warm and relevant enough to spend time on. Get agreement on what that means: Has an SDR initiated a conversation? Confirmed the lead is actually employed at a relevant company? Do they need to be in a specific role to be considered an SAL?

Finally, SQLs are leads that have been thoroughly vetted by the sales team and everyone agrees they have a good chance of becoming a customer. Again, define what this means: maybe they’ve had a 1:1 conversation with an SDR. Maybe their role, company size, and current buying intentions have been confirmed over email. 

One caveat here: not every company includes SALs in their processes, and that’s fine. If your organization wants to go directly to SQLs, it doesn’t really matter. The whole point is that everyone agrees on what threshold a lead needs to meet in order to progress to the next stage.

When marketing and sales teams agree on these granular definitions, it helps everyone avoid wasting time on leads that aren’t likely to become customers. It helps your marketing team know what information to prioritize on dynamic forms, and build effective progressive profiling. It makes reporting much easier. And it removes excuses for failing to follow up on good leads.

Sales and Marketing in Action: Progressive Profiling

Progressive profiling allows full-service agency The Marketing Guys to prioritize and capture the most relevant information about leads during webinar registrations. Marketers use that data to refine future engagement and the sales team has visibility to tailor conversations. 

Of course, the quality of a lead isn’t just based around what company they work for or what their title is. To really improve your lead quality, you need to look at behavioral signals that indicate how interested they are in buying your product—so you know when to nurture, when to have a conversation, and how to keep the buyer moving in the right direction. 

Enter lead scoring.

How to use lead scoring to align sales and marketing

There’s no single, uniform point when a lead is ready to go from marketing to sales. It all depends on your buying journey, the complexity of your product, the number of people involved in decision-making, and the preferences of your audience. Plus, that “hand-off” to sales might be more of a back-and-forth along the course of today’s non-linear buying journey. 

That’s where lead scoring can be immensely useful to keep sales and marketing teams aligned—and to automate a time-consuming process. 

Lead scoring is a quantitative framework you can use to rank and prioritize leads based on their actions and characteristics. Demographics like job title and company size, as well as behaviors like visiting certain webpages or downloading specific content, are assigned points—based on a hierarchy the sales and marketing team develop together.

For example, if a prospect checks out your pricing page, that’s a good sign they’re interested in buying your product—and it warrants a high score. But if another lead visits your careers page, that means they may be more likely to apply for a job than buy your product—so they might receive a low or even negative score. 

Your sales and marketing team should sit down together and develop the prioritization and scoring of all the different kinds of behaviors prospects can take. Then, you can determine what the total score would be to prompt a movement from lead to MQL, then MQL to SAL. You might decide that certain behaviors, like requesting a demo or starting a free trial, should catapult a lead directly into SAL territory. Over time, smaller indicators like reading case studies, attending webinars, and downloading a comparison guide could add up together to move a lead to the next stage of their buyer’s journey. 

Again, there’s no clear-cut answer on when a lead is ready to move from nurture campaigns to one-on-one conversations. That’s only for your sales and marketing team to decide—together. 

Sales and Marketing in Action: Lead Scoring

The sales and marketing teams at cloud services provider interworks.cloud automatically score lead behaviors along the customer lifecycle. Marketers use lead scoring to segment and nurture prospects, and then escalate leads to SQL status once a certain threshold is met—triggering a notification to the sales team within their Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

Once your lead definitions and scoring system are agreed-upon and documented, it’s time to put them into practice. And for most teams, that means integrating your technology.

• No shared understanding around who we’re trying to reach.
• Inconsistent methods of measuring success.
• Poorly integrated tech that doesn’t support simple handoffs.
• Frequently assigning blame but rarely sharing credit for revenue results.
• Real or imagined cultural clashes (“Marketers are mired in process and research.” “Sales only cares about hitting targets, by any means necessary.”).  
• And, sometimes, a lack of trust and personal relationships. 

We also know there are concrete steps every team can take to get back on the same page. Read on to learn how manageable tasks like documenting buyer personas, developing a lead scoring system, and improving tech integrations can achieve the impossible: sales and marketing working together.

Sales and Marketing Best Practices: Why Work Together?

The “marketing vs. sales” challenge is a tale as old as B2B time. It’s always been a problem—but in the modern, multichannel, digital-first era of B2B buying, this misalignment puts customer experience at risk. 

Today’s buyers are more reliant on digital information to move them along their journey. Research from Gartner shows that buyers only spend 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers—that’s all suppliers, not just the winning solution. The majority of their buying journey hours are now spent on independent research. 

And the B2B buying journey is no longer a linear progression from marketing to sales, with one point of handoff along the way. Buyers are likely bouncing from digital channels to 1:1 sales conversations and back again as they learn about possible solutions, evaluate their options, and work with internal buying committees.

When sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned, those buyers can feel whiplash as they progress through their customer journey. And the teams themselves will have a more difficult time meeting their goals and doing their best work. 

Given this new normal, it’s more important than ever that sales and marketing teams work well together. It’s no longer about smoothing a one-time handoff—it’s about ongoing collaboration that delivers a seamless experience.

How sales and marketing teams are (usually) structured

Let’s start at the beginning: how marketing and sales teams are structured. Every organization will have their own approach based on their size, growth stage, and goals, but these basic functions are common across most B2B companies. 

Marketing teams usually include: 

• Demand generation marketers who are responsible for generating and nurturing new leads.
• Content marketers who strategically produce content across the lifecycle (including sales enablement materials).
• Marketing operations specialists (MOPS) who manage the technology and processes that support marketing (like a marketing automation platform). 
• Product marketers who develop go-to-market strategies and positioning.

Marketing teams can include many more roles, like SEO specialists, PR pros, creatives, and brand marketers, but the above teams tend to be the most intertwined with sales functions.

Sales teams usually include: 

• Business development representatives, or BDRs, who conduct outbound prospecting or do cold outreach to generate new leads.
• Sales development reps, or SDRs, who vet inbound leads (in other words, leads generated by marketing) with early conversations, usually with the goal of scheduling meetings for senior salespeople.
• Account executives, or AEs, who work with prospective buyers through the final stages of their journey and, ideally, close deals and manage ongoing customer relationships.
• Sales operations specialists who manage the technology and processes that support sales (like a CRM). 

Sometimes, SDRs will report into marketing, because they’re working closely with marketing-generated leads. Occasionally, BDRs will report into marketing, because they’re responsible for generating new leads. Sometimes one operations specialist supports both sales and marketing. But usually, these groups are separated into different parts of the org chart, eventually laddering up to the CEO. 

That’s where misalignment and miscommunication starts—but not where it ends.

How silos form and tensions build between marketing and sales 

We all know what the finger-pointing sounds like when an organization doesn’t meet its revenue goals.

“Sales doesn’t follow up—we worked hard to get those leads!” 

“Marketing keeps sending us all these worthless leads—and keeps wasting our time!”

These are incredibly common scenarios. Research from Gartner shows that sales teams typically believe only 44% of MQLs are actually promising. That’s a big problem, because that means one of two things: marketers are wasting a lot of time generating the wrong kinds of leads, or sales has a skewed idea of what “promising leads” should look like.

For two teams with such closely related big-picture goals, there’s often a huge disconnect around what makes a “good lead”, and when best to engage them in one-on-one sales conversations. 

This primarily happens when marketing and sales teams lack alignment around:

• Their target audience—who are we trying to reach? 
• Their metrics and definitions—what’s an SQL, anyway?
• Their technology and processes—how do our systems talk to each other?

Misalignment also happens when there’s an overall lack of communication, respect, and clear responsibilities. That often comes from the top—when sales and marketing leaders are dealing with office politics, power struggles, and fighting over budgets, their downstream teams tend to lack the organizational support needed to foster healthy collaboration. And when these teams are siloed, it’s easy for common stereotypes around the clashing personalities of sales and marketing professionals to set the narrative. 

The costs of poor sales and marketing collaboration

When this constant blame game and lack of collaboration is the norm, not only is the work environment less pleasant, the organization suffers. Poorly aligned sales and marketing teams don’t learn from each other, missing the chance to improve their messaging and talking tracks. Teams waste time on generating, nurturing, and talking with the wrong leads. Leaders develop inaccurate forecasts based on inconsistent metrics. And buyers miss out on a cohesive customer experience. 

That’s enough of the negatives. In the next piece in this series, we’ll pivot to how to solve some of these thorny alignment problems through clear planning and strategy.

Economists say we’re on the edge of a recession. A study showed a 7 in 10 chance we’ll cross over the brink during 2023. Does it mean they’re right? 

Maybe. 

But fortunately, there are some practical changes you can make regardless of economic conditions that can help get ahead of whatever comes next. Some of our own marketing experts recently sat down with the marketing geniuses at ZoomInfo to get their take on how to market during a recession and what you can do now to get prepared.

Fight Back Against MarTech Stack Bloat

MarTech bloat is a tricky problem, sneaking in when you least expect it, slowly getting out of hand and then wasting valuable time and money. And wasting marketing resources is the last thing you want during a recession. 

So, what can you do? 

The answer is simple: Get rid of the slackers. 

Evaluate your technology, what you’re actually using, and which tool uses too many resources or isn’t pulling its weight. For example, once upon a time, you might have purchased a really powerful technology with many capabilities. The challenge is that fully using all of those capabilities might require more internal resources than you have. And this adds up to extra expenses and time wasted.

“What you need to be thinking about is, rather than buying everything that you think is going to add value, focus on a few things that are going to be really important for your go-to-market motions and doing those really well.”

-Dom Catabay, Director of Demand Generation at Act-On

So overall, isolate the technology holding you back and search for opportunities to improve your tech stack. Sometimes this involves onboarding new tech to improve your results (counterintuitive, right?). Not all technology is created equal. The goal is to reduce bloat, so use these tips when bringing in new tools:

• Speed up revenue growth … fast. Every moment, every month and every dollar matter during an economic squeeze. So make sure new tech pays off fast. 
• Help monitor and improve performance. The old saying “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” is even more critical during a downturn. Make sure you can tap into reports that show campaign performance so you don’t have to go on a search mission across several platforms. 
• Get rid of data silos. Is your data flowing as seamlessly as it could be? Or is data stuck in silos, causing you to miss out on valuable insights that could help you make better decisions and drive more revenue? You need interconnected data that drives efficiency and helps you get better results. 
• Boost data hygiene. Some solutions don’t promote data hygiene, and this problem area can have a big impact on your bottom line. One study found that data hygiene issues cost organizations roughly 12% of their revenue. Wouldn’t you like some of that back during a difficult economy? 
• And finally, promote scalability. Marketing automation helps offload boring, mundane tasks so your marketing teams can focus on higher-level work. And it helps you scale, which is critical when working on growing during a challenging economy. 

Tap Into the Bottom of the Funnel

As marketers, we know that MQLs are important, but shifting how you think about them can be a game changer. For starters, consider that the lowest cost per MQL isn’t always the best. 

Why? 

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you have 10 MQLs that cost $100 each, but the conversion rate is only 10%. A similar program costs $500 per MQL, but the conversion rate is 50%. Sure, they look similar, but one might result in more bottom-of-the-funnel conversions — and that’s a big difference. 

So, yes, look at the cost per MQL, but then take it a step further and look at the bottom-of-the-funnel performance. How well are those MQLs converting once they get into the hands of your salespeople? Quality over quantity — always.

Kick Bad Leads Out of the Funnel

It’s counterintuitive, right? You worked really hard to get those leads — why kick them to the curb? Here’s the thing: Bad leads waste your sales team’s time, and time is money. So you need to figure out which leads are bad and get them out of your funnel pronto. What’s a bad lead? Here are a couple of examples:

The prospect is a poor fit. 

They lack purchasing intent. 

Their business isn’t suited for your products and services. 

Totally fine, but send these prospects packing instead of inadvertently passing them to your salespeople who work crazy hard trying to convert them — an uphill, if not impossible, task. 

This is a shift for some marketers who in the past tried to fill the pipeline with as many leads as possible. More leads translate to more revenue, right? 

Not exactly. 

So, how do we fix this problem? 

Two words: lead scoring. 

Lead scoring is a tracking system for the qualification process. It assigns each lead a number that shows whether that lead is ready for your sales team or it needs to be nurtured or — in some cases — kicked out of the funnel altogether. 

It’s the opposite of a spray-and-pray approach. You can tell how well lead scoring is working by tracking conversions. If you do it well, conversions should keep ticking up. And higher-quality leads, of course, translate to more sales and greater ROI, which brings us to our next point.

Search for Truth with ROI 

Marketers are no strangers to the ROI discussion. But if you think you talked a lot about ROI last year, just wait until you’re marketing in a recession. You’ll have that conversation so much more often. But that’s okay. You can get ready now. 

“Oftentimes we go into budgeting meetings and we ask about a tech and we talk about the spend and ask the question about the ROI and total cost of ownership of the tool and you can get a deer in the headlights kind of look…”

-Cameron Kilgore,  VP of Revenue Operations at Act-On

The past several years have been prosperous for some industries like tech, and many adjacent technologies have found their way into the tech stack. Oh yes, bloated tech stack, remember? But adjacent technologies don’t support growth, and every tool needs to do its part. ROI will help you quickly determine which tools aren’t pulling their weight. 

Plus, if you know the ROI of all your tools, you’ll be prepared when your budget comes under fire. You can share the specific ROIs and show stakeholders what discontinuing a tool will cost them. They can see the impact. They can see the dollars. And nobody wants to mess with the dollars during a downturn.

Leverage This ‘Secret Weapon’ for Success

Marketing and sales alignment … yeah, yeah, you know it’s important. But during an economic downturn, it’s your secret weapon for success. 

Here’s why: Marketing is traditionally focused on MQLs, and they’re important, for sure. But as we discussed earlier, you’ve got to also focus on the bottom of the funnel. You see, marketing and sales are part of the same team. If they lose, so do you. And in a tough economy, you need both to win. Bad. 

Keep your eye on MQLs but also on how well those leads convert at the bottom of the funnel. Make any necessary adjustments quickly. And work with your salespeople so they understand which technologies give them the best leads and the highest conversions. As you do this, you’ll get sales executives on your side. They’ll know what’s working and won’t want anybody to mess with it. You and sales are now in the same corner, and that’s what alignment is all about.

Navigating Curveballs … and Hitting Home Runs 

The only thing we know about the future is that change will come … and it will keep on coming. Maybe good, maybe amazing, maybe challenging. We just don’t know … yet. But as marketers, we can get ready for whatever’s next by getting rid of our martech bloat, understanding the ROI of all of our tools and getting aligned with sales. 

These strategies will help you do more with less, spot better leads, improve conversion rates and, ultimately, drive up your revenue in the coming year. So whether or not the economic predictions are correct, you’ll be ready. 

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Using marketing automation data in conjunction with a clean and efficient CRM will help your company better meet the needs of your prospects and customers, and streamline the sales process. Let’s get into detail about marketing automation and CRM integration as a key part of your marketing and sales growth.

What is Marketing Automation Data?  

Marketing automation, as you know, is a set of marketing actions that are interconnected, automated, and tracked. Common components of automated marketing programs include:

• Landing pages 
• Forms (connected to both automation platform and CRM)
• Emails & SMS messages
• Social media posts
• Advertising
• Gated content

By observing and tracking interactions with these and other marketing elements, we build a better understanding of the people we’re trying to sell to. In a B2B environment, we can get a clearer vision into buyer intentions, and even aggregate details at the company level, when several people are involved in the search for a product or service for the same business. The types of information that are important to track in marketing automation include: 

• Behaviors on the website
  • Content the user interacted with
  • Forms they filled out
  • How long they viewed certain important pages
  • Downloaded assets
  • Event registrations
  • Even (aggregate) heat maps to show page interaction
• Purchases
• Email behaviors (opens, click throughs, responses)
• Social media behaviors
• Ad interactions
• App activity 

Marketing automation data can be accessed, displayed, and shared in different ways, depending on your MarTech stack. The key to success is making sure sales and marketing are aligned in purpose and process, that your tools are the right fit for your needs, and that they are configured properly. Your marketing is not really automated if you must manually pull and share crucial data that helps your sales team stay on point. 

How Marketing Data Helps Sales Identify the Area of Interest

Marketing automation data can help you determine areas of interest to focus on in the sales process. Whether that’s a particular industry vertical, key features of your product, or other details you can gather from the user’s interaction with your website and content, determining an area of interest should be relatively easy with the right integration of marketing automation data into the sales process.

Marketing data can help you to determine areas of interest, including:

• Industry verticals
• Product features or service type
• Methodologies / strategies
• Marketing channels (SMS, Social Media, Website, Email)

Rather than a generic pitch, the data allows your automated marketing workflows to send the right message to the right buyer at the right time to nurture the relationship. Plus,salespeople can use the same data and insights to have better informed, more relevant conversations with buyers, and business development professionals can tailor the conversation to the area of interest right from the start. It’s a great way to focus a sales call, especially when it’s a first conversation with a live representative after having combed through content and research. Done right, the prospect will feel seen without getting the heebie jeebies. 

It’s important to be subtle when gearing a sales conversation toward a specific area of interest apparent in the marketing automation data. It’s not a good idea to say “I see that you’ve interacted with this particular content,” for example. Rather, try: “XYZ incorporated, looks like you’re working in ABC industry, right? Have you started looking into channel X? Our other customers doing ABC have noticed a huge uptick in leads by focusing on X.”

Determine Prospect Readiness 

Marketing automation data can determine which phase of the buyer’s journey the prospect is in, and how quickly a sale might be possible. The best salespeople will tell you, there’s no quicker way to kill momentum than to push too hard when the lead is not ready. And, second worst probably is not being aggressive enough when the lead is ready to buy. 

Use key indicators of prospect readiness to build a lead scoring system in your marketing automation platform, and make sure that lead score can be seen and used within (or in conjunction with) your CRM. 

Key indicators of prospect readiness that you can see in marketing data:

• Visited pricing page
• Watched an on-demand product demo
• Opened lots of emails
• Re-opened or replied to emails
• Downloaded bottom-of-the-funnel content

Sales professionals can use this type of data to assign the right resources and intensity to every lead. When it’s accessible directly from your CRM, the whole process works even better.  

Uncover the Best Offer or Conversation Track for the Sales Call

Using marketing automation data to guide the way, your team can be even more laser focused in the B2B sales conversation. You can use information about industry, area of interest and readiness to really tailor the call. Marketing automation data can help you:

• Uncover the best offer
• Determine your best sales technique
• Figure out what pain points might still exist
• Ask the right questions

Close More Deals with Seamless CRM and Marketing Automation Integration 

The bottom line is, your business will be able to grow even faster with the right approach to using marketing data in the sales conversation. Having the right marketing automation platform, properly integrated with the right CRM allows your marketing and sales teams to accomplish so much more. Streamlined sales conversations lead to a clearer conversion path, shortened sales cycles, and more deals closed. 

No matter which CRM your team uses, marketing automation, and the ongoing flow of data it provides, is a crucial resource. If you’d like to read in more detail about a marketing automation and CRM integration, we recently wrote about Act-On’s partnership with Zendesk Sell here. It’s a perfect example of how marketing data can enhance the sales conversation in real time, and includes specifics of how to use different types of data. 

Access Marketing Automation Data Inside Your CRM to Enhance Sales Success

The exact methods and capabilities of accessing marketing automation data inside your CRM will depend on what systems your team uses, and how they are configured and connected. The best scenario, of course, is a native integration, but there are many ways to connect, depending on whether your systems have an open API, or not. 

Here are some examples of how Act-On connects with four different CRMs:

Zendesk Sell + Act-On

One of the most powerful marketing automation and CRM integration out there today is the native integration between Act-On and Zendesk Sell. With this connection, Act-On Software empowers Zendesk customers to seamlessly access a variety of behavioral data, templates and automated outreach tools (like SMS and email). Plus, the connection allows Zendesk Sell users to use Act-On to create, qualify, and nurture leads.

Salesforce + Act-On

Sales teams using Salesforce CRM can gain visibility, and identify the hottest prospects with the connection between Act-On marketing automation and Salesforce. This allows sales people to focus on the right leads at the right time, using marketing automation data to fill out the picture, and guide the conversation while maximizing customer lifetime value with funnel reports. 

Microsoft Dynamics + Act-On

The integration between Microsoft Dynamics and Act-On creates the opportunity for total transparency into the customer profile, journey, and behaviors. Sales people use this connection to create a central command center for creating, managing, and tracking campaigns across multiple channels throughout the customer lifecycle.

SugarCRM + Act-On

Marketing and sales teams using the SugarCRM and Act-On integration to track and share performance across departments have told us this type of integrated data provides the platform from which they can analyze, pivot and grow.  

Boost Sales Call Success with Marketing Automation Data

No matter what MarTech stack is in place for your sales and marketing teams, it is important to connect them. If that connection can be a deep, two-way, real-time sync, that’s best. Any data on your potential customer’s interests and behavior will be helpful for the sales conversation, because it allows the conversation to be uniquely tailored. Using marketing automation data in the sales process is one essential step toward business growth.

Although the price point of an email service provider (ESP) is very attractive, its capabilities pale in comparison to those of marketing automation. ESPs allow marketers to send batch-and-blast emails, but they don’t do much beyond that. In fact, if you want to implement and execute more targeted campaigns, they often create a lot more manual work. 

Even if you have a good rhythm handling your weekly workload and your current solution helps you get things done, there’s always room for improvement. That’s where marketing automation comes in. This innovative and powerful technology is designed to grow with the needs of your organization and give you the tools you need to better understand your audience, deliver targeted messaging, and close the loop between Marketing and Sales. Marketing automation empowers marketers to move beyond simply getting the job done and transform your marketing efforts to attract more customers, deliver more qualified leads to Sales, and drive ROI. 

This shortlist of benefits only scratches the surface of what you can achieve by investing in marketing automation.  Today, we’re on a mission to demystify this powerful technology by walking you through the business case for making a marketing automation investment. 

Go Beyond Email and Empower Your Team to Do More with Less

How many times has someone on your team come up with a great idea that never comes to fruition due to lack of time? This is a scenario that many of us have seen time and time again regardless of the size of our team. The thing is, our marketing isn’t going to get better and we’re not going to see growth if we allow ourselves to get stuck in maintenance mode and don’t find a way to make these innovative marketing ideas come to life. 

If you’re already pressed for time, this might seem crazy. After all, how can you do more when you’re already struggling to cross last week’s tasks off your list? But what if I told you that the right tool could help you free up time and resources so you and your team can focus on those critical projects that have been put on the backburner? 

This is where a quality marketing automation platform allows you to perform head and shoulders above your standard ESP. Unlike platforms such as MailChimp or Constant Contact, marketing automation goes far beyond email without requiring a major lift from your team. 

These are just some of the marketing automation features that empower you to do more with less. 

• Automatic Segmentation: Most of us think of segmentation as a tedious task that’s usually prone to error, especially given the manual lift typically involved. A marketing automation platform, however, drastically streamlines this process. Your team decides the criteria you want for each of your lists, and your prospects are automatically grouped as they move through the sales funnel and you uncover more information about who they are and what they do.  
• Trigger Emails and Campaigns: With marketing automation, the days of spending all your time building and scheduling out emails are over. Marketing automation allows you to set up trigger emails and campaigns that automatically launch when a user completes a specific user action such as signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, or downloading an eBook. This feature enables you to immediately reach out to and engage your prospects with relevant messaging so you can keep them moving through the sales funnel effectively. 
• Lead Nurturing and Prioritization: All opportunities look the same when you don’t have full visibility into their behavior and preferences, but the reality is that your contacts are at different stages of the sales funnel and have varying interests. Marketing automation allows you to score leads so you can determine where they are in the sales funnel and keep them moving along through personalized efforts such as automated nurture campaigns. This also allows you and your sales team to prioritize the best opportunities so you can focus your efforts where they matter most. 

In short, marketing automation allows you to save time performing the tasks you already do, empowers your team to do even more with fewer resources and less effort, and gives you the opportunity to bring innovative ideas to life. 

Deliver Personalized Messaging That Drives Conversions

With big players like Amazon and Facebook leading the way in providing personalized experiences, customers now expect every company to do the same. This sets the bar high for B2C and B2B companies alike, and those that do an excellent job of delivering targeted recommendations drastically improve their chance of coming out on top. 

Still, figuring out what our customers want and when isn’t easy. As previously mentioned, marketing automation allows you to start off on the right foot by automating the segmentation process. You can also say goodbye to the days of sending batch-and-blast emails and deliver your audience with more targeted recommendations that improve engagement and drive conversions.  

Marketing automation eliminates the hassle of having to spend hours creating and launching targeted email campaigns every time you want to reach a specific audience segment. Act-On, for instance, allows you to build automated nurture programs that launch as soon as customers meet the qualifications indicated for that campaign. This allows you to reach out to prospects and leads with the right type of content and information when they’re most likely to engage. Marketing automation also allows you to A/B test multiple variables so you can determine which subject lines, email templates, landing pages, and CTAs resonate best with your audience and then continue to optimize and perfect your efforts over time. 

In addition to creating more targeted emails, you can also customize how your prospects interact with your brand. Customized landing pages allow you to develop content and forms that will attract more prospects and convert more leads. This eliminates the need for your prospects to spend hours digging through your website and empowers you to pique their interest very early on. 

Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and Sales

No matter how skilled and efficient your marketing team is, they can’t convert leads into customers without the right sales processes in place. All your hard work will go to waste if your salespeople don’t have the right insights to guide their conversations, so it’s important that you equip them with the tools and information they need to have more targeted conversations. 

You’ve probably heard a thing or two from your sales team about how marketing fails to deliver enough qualified leads, but marketing automation can help solve this problem. In fact, according to Smart Insights, 57% of marketers claim that marketing automation has helped them attract more leads, which can then be passed to Sales in a smooth handoff with transparency and invaluable customer insights as prospects move through the sales funnel (1). 

In addition to helping you attract your target customers, marketing automation helps you improve alignment between marketing and sales by improving collaboration and communication. For example, Act-On allows you to set up alerts so your sales representatives immediately get notified when a prospect takes an important action and when a qualified lead is ready to talk. This way, your sales team will never skip a beat when it comes to engaging hot leads.

 If you’re working with an ESP, you’re probably cringing at the thought of having to track down user behavior data for each qualified lead that comes through the door. When you execute your campaigns through a marketing automation platform, however, handing your salespeople the information and insights they need becomes a more streamlined process. And if you integrate Act-On with the rest of your MarTech stack,  your salespeople will be able to view each customer’s or account’s behavior history right from the CRM of your choice. 

Gain Access to the Tools and Insights You Need to Innovate and Strengthen Your Marketing and Sales Strategy

One of the most valuable features of marketing automation is that it enables you to centralize your data so you can better see how each individual and account is interacting with your marketing efforts across all channels. This holistic view allows you to gain a sense of which marketing efforts are resonating with your audience and which are not — and determine the best way to continue engaging them moving forward.  

Beyond measuring the success of your marketing, this centralized view of your results enables you to attribute ROI to specific efforts and campaigns with ease. This helps data-driven marketers prove the value of their work to leadership and show how marketing automation supports the success of teams across your organization. 

Everybody Wins When You Use Act-On

Now that we’ve reviewed the many benefits of marketing automation, I want to stress that not every solution is created equal. You should choose a platform that works with your current resources, integrates with your MarTech stack of choice, and can grow with the needs of your organization. Act-On is easy to use, gives you the most bang for your buck, and provides you with the support you need to make the most out of your investment. 

If you believe marketing automation is the way to go and want to learn more about how to make the business case to your executive team, please download our eBook, Selling Act-On to Your Executive Team (linked below).  

Our discussion ranged over the future of CRM, the role of marketing automation, and how to make connections with customers, whether they’re water utility customers in Scotland or hockey fans in Philadelphia. This discussion has been edited for brevity.

ACT-ON: The most successful companies are those that are customer-centric and know how to sell the way the customer wants to buy. What company or companies do you see doing this well?

PAUL GREENBERG: It’s interesting, the last 15, 20 years we’ve all been talking about customer centrism. It’s a good term. It means something. But it’s become bland; every company claims it and very few of them do it. “Customer engaged” is a more active term. It means that you have actually got the eyes and ears of the customer. And the customer is interacting with you; the customer is interested in you. That’s customer engaged.

I’ll give you two extremely different examples. One is Scottish Water, which is a utility company in Scotland. The other is the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team. Just to be clear I’m a Rangers fan. But I love the Flyers for what they’re doing.

Scottish Water spends hundreds and thousands of hours trying to figure out how to get the customers they have what they need. And they want the customers to help them do this. So they build major league customer engagement strategies. For example, I have a 230-page document on their current customer engagement strategy. It covers the approximately 125 things Scottish Power does. And they ask their users these kinds of questions:

“Which of these things are most important to you? Which ones are kind of medium? Which ones are low but still important to you? And which ones are just not all that important to you? Help us prioritize, so that we can budget and build accordingly.”

They do this through online surveys, focus groups (which I’m not a huge fan of), every avenue known to the human species, and every channel that is possible. This company is constantly interacting with their customers, getting their feedback, and building their models, and investing accordingly. And then, which is really important in this whole process, they tell their customers what they’re doing. They don’t just say thanks and go away, which is what happens nine-tenths of the time with feedback.

They say, here’s what we’re doing. And then they ask, does this work for you? The customer will say, maybe, maybe not. Then the company says to the maybe-nots: Tell us why not. They have the conversation. They move on. They figure it out. They move ahead again. So for example, a top priority issue might be the utility bill. The billing is too high, pricing is too high. An actual example of a low-level important issue was the odor of the water. Interruptions were a huge issue for them.

That’s not sexy at all. But that’s engagement – their customers are actually fully involved with them. And the company is acting on the decisions that they’re making together, providing the customers what they actually want.

So here’s my definition of customer engagement: It’s the ongoing interactions between company and customer – offered by the company, chosen by the customer. Key to everything.

So now, on the whole other end of the spectrum, we see the Philadelphia Flyers. They have two programs. One’s called How You Doing? [LAUGHTER] It’s been around for years. And secondly they have the Early Bird program. Now just so you understand: in terms of sports, the “customer” is a season ticket holder. That is the key customer in all of sports. The Flyers know that there are two things they have to do: retain the customers they have, and get new season ticket holders. That means that the ambiance at the stadium is going to matter. One goal is to convert the casual game goer to a season ticket holder.

So, the How You Doing? program is very simple. Every single person who comes to Wachovia Center is greeted. When you walk in the door, a staff member will greet you. Then they ask you a question: Can I do anything for you? And if that customer says – or the fan says – yes, that staff member is empowered to literally just leave their station and go do it immediately. That could be a senior vice president. It doesn’t matter. Every single person is responsible.

There’s a lot more to this, but I’ll put it this way:

• 87 percent of all the fans over the last five years have been greeted and have actively interacted.
• The fans rate the results, one to five. Five star meaning highly satisfying. 97 percent highly satisfied, five out of five.

The Early Bird program is this: We want you to renew your season ticket early. Not give us more money; renew early. The benefits are obvious. The Flyers get revenue in the bank, and they can start planning for the next season. It really has a huge uptick for them. How they do it? It’s the customer experience they provide, what I call “consumable experiences.”

The Flyers have everybody tiered, one through five stars, based on the propensity to renew. Five star, four star people get physical postcards. It’s not online, it’s not web, it’s not video on YouTube. It’s a postcard that lists the things you can get with early renewal, and the list is just wow-cool. For example (this is my favorite in particular) if you’ve got a kid between 6 and 14, that kid can go on the ice during a live game, and as the team’s coming out, they can high five the team. That’s amazing, that just blows me away.

There’s many more like that. And regardless of your propensity to renew, you get invited to the team barbeque. [LAUGHTER] It’s the one you go to and you just hang with the team all day. Any early bird renewal does that. So here are the numbers from a three-year study from 2010, 2011, and 2012:

• One star: 83.7 percent of all season ticket holders renewed early
• Two stars: 84.7 percent renewed early
• Three stars: It was 82 percent
• Four stars: It went up to 89 percent
• Five stars:92 percent

I don’t know if I’m exact on the numbers, but it’s close enough. 92 percent. That’s phenomenal. That’s engagement. That’s a team that’s customer-centric. They get it. The best thing, of course, is to have a winning season. But this team also knows you don’t have that all the time – and yet these guys are wildly successful. They’re selling out all the time, because they are fully engaged at every single level with the fans.

One other thing happens. Look, we’re all human beings, and there are only two things that we all have in common with each other. One, we’re self-interested; we each have an individual life we want to lead. The second is that we all want to be happy. So if you’re an employee of this team, you want to do things to help the team. But you’re also self-interested; you want something for it too. The team makes this happen. You can get high ratings as an employee from these fans, through these cards, and the greetings and so on.

And you get compensated for it. Not just small bonuses. If you’re really good, you can get a $1,000 bonus. You can get a vacation. This is in the DNA of the company. Everybody is engaged, employees, and customers, and management, and staff. Everybody.

So you have on the one hand Scottish Water. You have on the other hand the Philadelphia Flyers. Two extreme examples. Both customer-centric. But really, they’re customer engaged.

The future of CRM

ACT-ON: How do you see CRM evolving over the next few years?

PAUL GREENBERG: Let’s look back, say, 10 years. You had traditional CRM which everyone knew was sales force automation. Then marketing automation was incorporated into that, and customer service. But what wasn’t incorporated at the time was social channels. Then we had the communications revolution, the information revolution. And CRM evolved again, to social CRM.

With social CRM, in addition to those customer-facing functions, from a technology standpoint, they incorporated the ability to communicate with customers – because the customer is now controlling the conversation. Social channels became integrated technologically. Now what we’re seeing is a whole other big transition. Social CRM is no longer social CRM. It’s just CRM; every CRM application in the world has it. But there’s a huge transition going on. It’s a monster.

We’re moving to a place where customer engagements are becoming primary. A McKinsey survey showed that for 69 percent of the surveyed corporations, customer engagement was top of mind, the number one of the top three things they were concerned about. Gartner is forecasting by 2017 that the market for CRM will be $37 billion. It’s probably still one fifth or sixth of what the customer engagement market’s going to be.

So you know what CRM becomes in this? It becomes a subsumed market, a submarket inside of a larger customer engagement market. And CRM, despite the many battles I and others have waged, has become the technology to handle the operations and transactions of customer-facing businesses. It’s the system of record. It’s going to grow, but at the same time it’s going to occupy a specific place in a much bigger kind of – I don’t use the word revolution very lightly, so I’m not going to call it that. But say, a much bigger evolution of the market toward engagement.

ACT-ON: Do you see marketing automation playing a role in helping companies deliver a unified customer experience?

PAUL GREENBERG: Marketing automation is part of CRM from an umbrella standpoint. But what’s been interesting about marketing in particular – I’m just going to  eliminate the “automation” piece for a second – what’s interesting about marketing in particular is that it has become by far the hottest single area of the customer-facing universe. But it’s also beginning to morph. It’s morphing into marketing – not at the place to push messages in the face of people, but as the first line of engagement. It’s not just where you intersect the customer for the first time; it’s also about how you keep the customer engaged.

This all goes to the heart of how it handles customer experience. Marketing is now becoming aligned with sales. And that’s a big deal. It’s actually a very big deal. It was first identified by Peppers and Rogers back in 2008 with a paper called “The New Power Couple.” And then very funnily, Aberdeen Group did an entirely different paper in 2011 also entitled “The New Power Couple.”

The whole idea basically showed that the alignment of sales and marketing actually improved, A, the revenue of a company, and B, the experience customers have with the company because it was a coherent interaction between the two departments who had been at odds historically, because they had different objectives. So now what you see is, A, marketers being given revenue objectives; and B, discussions going on between the two departments so that they are marketing the campaigns and the messaging is aligned. Sales people are not necessarily altering the corporate marketing, and marketers are sensitive to what salespeople need.

Now what’s the benefit to a customer? Well, benefit one is the customer doesn’t get confused by hearing one message from the corporate level and another from the sales guy. So there’s a certain level of confidence that it’s either built or retained depending on the relationship of the customer to the company to begin with. Secondly, because marketing has the technology to make messaging consistent and scale it, the messaging becomes something that customers can see here – and see there – and see everywhere.

And that’s important. I mean that’s beyond important.  Because the customer is saying, I want to see this on the web, I want to see this in an email, I want to see this – to put it in the current horrible term name, “omnichannel.” (The world’s worst name. It’s accurate, but it’s the world’s worst name.)

So, marketing automation serves that omnichannel experience that people are looking for. It’s one of the strengths of marketing automation, that it can normalize things. Meaning you can have consistent messaging, you can have the capability to actually accomplish what you need to accomplish and measure it, you can have the ability to get it to the customers in the places they want to see it, in the way that you want to get it there. And that’s important. But it’s not very sexy, and most sales and marketing people love the sexy stuff, the real hot stuff.

But most customers actually don’t. Most customers what whatever it is they want, when they want it. And they want to hear what they need to hear and learn what they need to learn the way they want to learn it. And that’s it. They don’t really have to be delighted all day and night. They simply have to be satisfied enough to want to continue to interact with you. And marketing automation technologically enables that.

ACT-ON: Very enlightening! Thank you, Paul.

PAUL GREENBERG: Thank you, Paige.

To contact Paul Greenberg, catch him on Twitter at @pgreenbe or Facebook at pgreenbe, or email him at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com.

We often find that many of our client businesses are facing an enemy within – an enemy that small and mid-sized companies can’t afford to ignore: Each time a salesperson is let go or quits, they take some of their clients with them.  This can result in a sales slump that varies depending on how many clients the sales rep takes with them and how large those accounts were.

It’s surprising to learn that, according to Symantec research, half of the employees admit to taking corporate data when they leave a job, and 40% intend to use it in a new position.  It is estimated that an even higher percentage of salespeople take company and client information when they leave a job.  What makes these findings even more shocking is the fact that even when sensitive intellectual property theft occurs and the company finds out, more than half of the time the company takes no action against the former employee.

There are ways to mitigate this loss of prospects, clients, and data; it just takes some creative problem-solving. Here are three solid strategies to help.

Marketing Automation

What could a marketing automation system have to do with keeping your customer lists safe? This may not seem like a direct link at first, but hear me out. As you gain leads, they come into your marketing automation system where all their information is captured. As they interact with you (e.g. visiting a web page, opening an email) those activities are tracked and logged. The marketing team manages the leads, acting on them to gently move them further down the funnel, often using drip marketing programs for education and relationship building. Marketing retains the leads until they are ready for sales, reducing (if not outright eliminating) cold calls, and sending the salesperson information about warm leads only.  This means that when a salesperson leaves your company, your marketing team still retains all prospect and client information and behavioral data. Since the salesperson can’t access the marketing database, it’s an extra layer of data protection.

Sales Team Structure

The main reason customer relationship management (CRM) systems often don’t work in a small-to-medium business is that salespeople generally hate paperwork and data entry.  Not only that, usually they aren’t good at these activities.  In some companies structuring a sales team as a Hub-and-Spoke is a practical way to make salespeople happier and yield higher sales. You do this by assigning a full-time CRM sales support admin for every five to ten salespeople; the number of salespeople an administrator can support depends on how technical the nature of a sale is. All the salesperson does is close the deal; as soon as it’s closed they inform the client that someone will call them and take the order. Deploying a Hub-and-Spoke structure to your sales team has three main benefits:

• Firstly, if deployed properly all salespeople will get more time on the road or on the phones engaging with clients since they should have much less paperwork.
• Secondly, the CRM sales support admin does most of the paperwork, but salespeople have to gather the information.  With the admin holding salespeople to account for data completeness – there will be no more half-filled information on your CRM!
• Lastly, since the CRM now holds all the information and part of the relationship is held by the internal CRM admin, even if the salesperson leaves the customer is more likely to stay with the company.

Systems integration and security

Marketing automation systems are more effective when integrated with a CRM system, and even more so when the CRM is housed or connected to an ERP system.  With this method you not only have cradle-to-grave tracking of all your revenue and marketing functions but you also have incredible levels of intimate knowledge of all your customers.  In the event a salesperson leaves your company, all past information remains securely stored and a new salesperson can pick up right where the last one left off.

And in the end…

It all comes down to the execution of any program or system.  There are many naysayers that would tell you that a close relationship with a customer trumps any technical information you have on them.  The truth is, those two aspects of the relationship are increasingly commingled as more technology comes into play, especially technologies like marketing automation that foster personalization and deeper customer understanding. And while the sales role remains highly specialized and critically important, the customer lifecycle is increasingly managed through marketing and support, making the sales relationship a smaller part of it. If your customer’s total experience with your company has been positive (and especially if you’re doing retention marketing), it’s more likely that their loyalty is to the company, and less likely that it’s to the sales rep. Remember also that buyers know there’s a risk in changing vendors.

Through superior information gathering, data completeness, and delivering value, your company can meet and exceed your client’s needs throughout the entire lifecycle.  If you do this and do it well, most if not all of your current clients will stay with your company – even if one of your salespeople tries to take them as they leave.

If there’s a moral to the story it’s this: Keep your friends close – and your customers closer.

Nick Bideshi is Co-Founder of Industrial Quality Management, a company that helps B2B clients with revenue growth and profitability.  In addition, Nick is a passionate business consultant, entrepreneur, and business coach, and loves to build responsible leadership in SMBs.