6 Recommendations to Make the Most of Marketing Automation Solutions for the Sales Team

Marketing automation solutions such as Outreach, Groove, Marketo, and many more have made the life of salespeople easier in many ways. It is now possible to connect with a large number of accounts for their books of business with a click of a single button, test different messaging in order to understand which brings more meetings/opportunities, analyze statistics of each sent campaign, and more. But as more and more companies begin to use such solutions, additional risks and challenges emerge. People start doing a better job distinguishing mass-sent emails from manual ones and start ignoring the former. The emails seem non-human. There are certain technical errors that happen every now and then and that puts the name of the recipient wrong. More importantly, there’s a growing fatigue to these emails in general, since with the ability to automate them, the volume of emails has grown dramatically. Only companies that have a well-thought strategy around email flows would be successful in enabling their salespeople to engage the large percentage of customers in their book of business and achieve amazing results. So, what factors do we need to keep in mind when preparing these campaigns to be sent through marketing automation solutions?

Individual or centralized campaigns?

The first decision you would need to make before leveraging the marketing automation solution for the sales reps is whether you would like to enable each of them to launch individual campaigns or would prefer to do that in a centralized way. Let’s discuss the benefits and risks associated with each approach.

When each rep would be responsible to launch all campaigns on their own, they have more control over the what and the when. They can potentially tailor the message better to the specific situations of their clients (since they know their book of business better than anyone), choose when each campaign should be sent, and control on a granular level which customers should and should not be included. The downside of this approach is that effective campaign management can be challenging and time-consuming. Preparing the templates, choosing the customers to include, checking who received and who didn’t receive the emails, and performing all sorts of other activities may occupy a significant part of a salesperson’s week. Also, it’s quite easy to make mistakes when launching campaigns. As a result, the clients would be stuck in the flows and will not receive any further automated emails until they’re manually removed from the old flows.

When campaigns are launched for all reps in a centralized way many of the risks above are eliminated. And most importantly the reps would not need to spend any time launching these campaigns, managing them, and analyzing the results — they would enjoy the large number of meetings booked instead with little effort from their side. The main risk factor associated with the approach is that it basically requires having a dedicated person who is going to launch these campaigns for the whole team. Not only does it mean that this person would be basically having almost a full-time job (or part-time, depending on the number of campaigns and size of the team) but she would also need to have deep expertise in campaign management, knowledge of email marketing, copywriter skills, and more.

Mixing upsell topics with value-focused

It’s often the case that when the sales teams try to leverage marketing automation solutions for the first time, the initial effect may be massive. Salespeople report to their managers that the number of opportunities created and meetings scheduled triggered by the flow was massive and were a great help in hitting their monthly quotas. Managers, of course, are happy with that feedback and start immediately planning the next flows. The second month may also be successful, but there’s already a noticeable decrease in results. Managers start to wonder whether the messaging with the second campaign wasn’t as good as the first one. They launch the campaign the third time and the results keep getting worse. Why is that happening? Because when the first campaign was sent, many customers who were not previously touched by account managers received the offer. And if it was compelling enough, they decided to take advantage of it. Given the fact that the marketing automation solutions enable the team to touch base with hundreds (or thousands) of clients simultaneously, the economic effect is also big. But the clients would not continue buying like that indefinitely. At a certain point (maybe, after a second or even third campaign), most of the customers who wanted (and were ready) to purchase immediately would’ve already done that. So the problem is not with the following campaign being worse prepared than the previous — it’s about the client’s needs.

That said, after all the low-hanging fruit has been gathered with the initial flows, it’s important to start leveraging campaigns to build relationships with the customers. And in account management relationships are rarely built on the “keep buying from me more and more” theme — instead, it’s all about the value the account manager can help to uncover from the product or service. So, in order for campaigns to have a long-lasting impact on AM results, I strongly recommend mixing the sales plays with value plays. The latter should be focused on how solutions included in the product can help clients address their business challenges — regardless of whether the email would include a CTA to schedule a call with the AM or would just be informational/educational. Sending value-focused flows regularly helps to reduce the risk of campaign fatigue the clients may develop. So even though some customers may end up unsubscribing from communication, the number of them would not be dramatic.

Determine groups of customers for each campaign

Regardless of whether you’re planning an upsell or value-based campaign, the impact of it is usually smaller if you’re planning to target all customers in the book of business. Firstly, there would be a higher probability that the message you send would not be very relevant to their needs. Secondly, the message would have to be generic and it would less likely to resonate with particular groups of customers (with whom it could’ve resonated otherwise). Here are some factors you might want to take into account when selecting a target group:

• Do we target clients with a particular level of spending on the product?
• Is the company size and industry important for this campaign?
• Do we focus on the customers that are on a particular subscription plan? If clients from multiple plans may be included, what are those plans?
• Are we only targeting clients with high usage of the product or this factor is irrelevant?
• And many more

The answers to these and many other questions that managers planning the campaigns need to discuss would be different depending on the goals for each campaign. For example, educational flow (e.g. on the new releases) may target all clients that are on a particular subscription plan and above (since those releases only affected those plans) and disregard the level of product usage. And for the upsell flow the usage may be more important since there’s a higher probability that the clients that heavily rely on the product (and as a result have better usage metrics) are more likely to upgrade. The more focused each campaign is, the fewer customers are going to be included in it. But as long as the campaign was well-prepared, the business impact of it would be much higher than of a generic one.

Be careful with flows with discounts

Experienced salespeople know that one always needs to handle discounts with caution. If the clients get a feeling that they can get a discount from their rep at any time, they would never agree to buy at full price. It wouldn’t make much sense since they would know that at the end of the month, their account manager would always have flexibility from the pricing standpoint. The very same factor should be taken into account whenever any campaigns involving discounts are being planned. Even if the team needs to finish the month strong, AMs should avoid offering discounts every month — otherwise, they would be basically shooting themselves in the leg. Another recommendation regarding discounts in the flows — do not mention the exact percentage of discount you would offer. Even if you know for sure that you would be ok with offering 5–10%, it’s always better to state that the discount will be available and you’ll discuss specific details on the call. This would enable AMs to have more flexibility when holding negotiations.

Make data-driven decisions

One of the amazing things about the marketing automation solutions available on the market is that most of them provide extensive data about the results of each launched campaign. Sales teams get visibility into how many emails were opened, how many calls were scheduled, how many contacts converted into opportunities, and more. All these data points enable teams to continuously improve the flows by analyzing what worked well and which campaigns didn’t resonate with the customers. In addition to analyzing the themes of campaigns, I also recommend paying attention to when they’re being sent — the day of the month, the day of the week, and even the time. Sometimes even slight changes in these parameters can increase the effectiveness of a campaign by several percent. Which, on a scale, can bring massive results.

Mind the laws

In different regions, there are many laws that govern communication that may go from the company to other businesses and individuals. A common example is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) which impacts all communication in European Union. Not being compliant with these laws may result in serious fines for the business. So before any campaign is launched, it’s critical to confirm that all the specifics covered by these laws are taken into account.

I hope this list would provide a good starting point for those planning to leverage the marketing automation solution in sales and help achieve amazing results!