Marketing Automation and Salesforce – Things to Keep in Mind
As companies grow and expand their reach, it gets complex for marketing departments to personalize relationships with every customer while cultivating new prospects. In order to stay relevant, companies must evolve and adapt their strategies to handle a larger workflow, tapping into the benefits of marketing automation.
Marketing automation streamlines the marketing process by taking care of redundant and repetitive tasks, enabling marketers to focus on the strategic aspects essential to the growth of the company. A well-implemented marketing automation system not only makes the marketing department more efficient by controlling entire campaigns remotely but also makes the sales force more effective by providing it with quality leads and predictive market data.
Why integrate Salesforce and marketing automation
Combining Salesforce and a marketing automation platform is helpful in optimizing lead generation and follow-up processes. Salesforce allows sales reps to keep track of prospects easily, organizing leads and following along as they move from prospects to customers. Marketing automation tools offer a platform to input leads, helping marketers to use the information to nurture them via personalized mailings. By integrating the two, brands have a far more effective tool for:
- Creating more leads.
- Ensuring all leads are followed up with.
- Prioritizing prospects.
- Personalizing lead experience.
- Tracking ROI
Here are some things to keep in mind when integrating Salesforce with a marketing automation platform.
Define your leads
Before you begin, define your leads in the various buying stages to avoid issues that arise from different departments speaking different languages. Think about the types of behavior, budget, need, timeline, leads need to display in order to be considered:
- Prospect – A lead at the top of the funnel, typically someone who submitted their contact information while downloading an e-book or other resources
- Marketing -qualified – Leads that meet specific criteria for marketing to share with sales
- Sales-accepted – Leads verified as qualified by the sales team
- Sales-qualified – Leads categorised as a good opportunity by the sales team
Identify customer segments
The sales and marketing teams must define major customer segments to make their messages relevant to the end user. Customers can be grouped according to the industry they belong to, interest in a particular product/service, the channel they were captured on etc. The kind of information on a particular lead is also important. Because leads can’t be bothered with extracting a wide range of information, organizations must decide which data points to collect using Salesforce up front and which ones to leave for later.
Chart communications
Next, decide the kind of communication to dispense to each segment such that they specifically target their interests. Personalization in communication shows potential customers that you’re paying attention to their individual needs. To do this, it may be helpful to create an email flow diagram that charts the different paths a lead can take, how they qualify for these emails, and the appropriate timing. For instance, Salesforce’s Pardot, a lead marketing automation tool, allows brands to reach potential clients through a number of means – email campaigns, social media, paid marketing etc., coinciding with specific Salesforce campaigns.
Develop a lead scoring model
The beauty of Salesforce lies in the fact that it allows for scoring leads using their behavioral data and demographic information. Not all interactions mean the same i.e. a recipient opening an email may not express the same amount of interest as actually visiting the website. Marketing automation can be used here to assign a numeric value to each action, defining thresholds for a lead to be considered marketing-qualified. By tallying up the value of each customer interaction, marketers can get a sense of when leads are primed for sales targeting. In this way, allowing behavioral data to dictate lead scoring will allow reps to get leads only once they’ve proven to be highly qualified.
In a nutshell
While integrating Salesforce and marketing automation may seem overwhelming at the initial stage, it is essential to run the sales process smoothly. Once leads are defined, messaging targeted, and behaviors assigned values, the sales funnel becomes simple. Integrating Salesforce with marketing automation thus sends only sales-qualified leads to the sales executives, leading to a win-win situation that saves organizations time and effort that can be invested towards larger business goals.
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