Automate to Dominate Prospect Engagement
Few companies can give up the prowl for new prospects, but those that commit to communications with wishy-washy potential customers may not speed along the business development path.
As customers make their journey through the different stages of their purchasing process, a salesperson’s presence isn’t required until near the end of their process.
Customers today usually wish to sample webinars, blog articles, eBooks, events, podcasts, and white papers to educate themselves even before they get to a demo or proposal.
These initial tasks are not something a skilled salesperson should be spending time on; these tasks are for marketing—tasks made simpler with CRM capability to distribute messages to prospects, measure their interest and set priorities around moving those prospects through the sales pipeline and the prospect’s purchasing process.
Marketing’s role has become focused on producing content—webinars, videos, white papers, events, LinkedIn and Twitter posts, company blogs and online community messages—that, thanks to modern distribution channels, can be measured for their success. When prospects enter your pipeline through an online registration for research your company has conducted or a lunch-and-learn hosted by your VP, your marketing team captures contact information and maybe more.
Then it decides how to build interest in your offerings through subsequent communications and determines whether the contact is a ready buyer, a decision maker, an influencer or none of these.
All of this is well and good, but if contact capture and communications aren’t run through a marketing automation platform within your CRM solution, you have a whole lot of data that will need to be collated before qualified leads are handed off to the sales department. And though ultimately you want to invite prospects to a conversation with your company, if two-way communications are not managed through your CRM system, dissemination of valuable feedback doesn’t happen in an efficient enough manner and fails to get the attention of the sales team.
For more on engaging and nurturing potential customers to best meet their needs and your sales quotas, get the “Sales Prospect Engagement: Automate to Dominate” white paper.