Where the Magic Happens: Integrating Sales and Marketing Automation

TLDR: Busy? Here’s the short version:

When you integrate both your sales and marketing automation, you get these two sides of your business talking to each other — automatically. Instead of each department working independently of the others, integrated automation helps to beautifully connect your different teams so that your business functions as one cohesive whole.

Have more time? Read on — you won’t regret it.

Automation Integration

Automation. It's become a buzzword of sorts lately. But here’s the thing. Most businesses who jump on the automation bandwagon do so in only one aspect of their business. Automating your sales process is amazing, and automating your marketing is doubly amazing. But the real magic happens when you integrate both sales and marketing automation.

See, business just ain’t the same as it used to be. Back when customers came mostly through word-of-mouth with very little information of their own, it wasn’t necessary for the marketing and sales teams to be aligned. The marketing department would just help spread the word and the sales team would take it from there. The whole process was quite sterile for the customer on the other end.

But times have changed. Potential customers are now extremely educated with the wealth of information that is available to them at the click of the mouse (or trackpad :)). Plus, customers’ opinions matter more than they ever did. In just a couple of minutes, a happy customer can promote your business on their social platform — and boom, you’ll see an almost immediate result.

But the opposite is also true. If you upset a customer and don’t make it right, you can’t just categorize them as a pain in the neck and call it a day. Nope — if you’ve got an angry customer, you have good reason to worry.

Today, when it's all about the personal relationship a company has with its customers, integrating your sales and marketing automation is a necessity. The main benefit you’ll derive will be increased visibility into the entire lifecycle of every contact.

You’ll be able to see every action a contact takes with your company and connect the dots to create a full picture of the contact. Your sales and marketing teams will be working with the same understanding of each individual contact and you’ll be able to give personal service to each contact depending on the actions they've previously taken.

Businesses who rise to the top use different models today than they’ve ever used, with the company-client relationship taking center stage. When you integrate your sales and marketing automation, you’re getting ahead in the game and positioning yourself a forward-thinking business.

But let’s dive deeper.

The Problem with Disjointed Automation

This is a heavy topic and it’ll take a few minutes for me to explain this in an easy-to-understand way. But if you stick with me until the end of this article, you’ll start to see how sales automation is a nice boost and marketing automation gives a hefty push … but integrating sales and marketing automation is like putting your business on long-term steroids. And while long-term steroids aren’t great for your body, they’re good news for your business.

So let’s say you have your marketing team working with automation. That means you have email marketing workflows (for whole-list communication) being triggered automatically and follow-up actions being done based on each specific contact’s level of interaction. But as fantastic as that all is, it doesn’t yet touch the sales side of your business.

Or let’s say you’ve got your sales team running with some sort of automation software. Tasks are being automatically created based on a contact’s actions, email sequences (for one-on-one communication) are running automatically, and deals are being closed. That’s great — but again, it doesn’t touch the marketing side of the business at all.

When you integrate both your sales and marketing automation, you get these two sides of your business talking to each other — automatically.

Getting Practical

Ok, sounds nice and all. But what does this mean practically?

It means that when a customer never opens marketing emails (marketing), your sales team can be automatically notified to follow-up with one-on-one communication (sales).

It means that when your sales team interacts with someone who isn’t ready to purchase and just needs more information (sales), they can enroll them in a workflow that would nurture the contact with helpful information (marketing).

It means that you can create workflows that would enroll a contact based on certain activities they took. So if a contact viewed your blog (marketing), opens 60% of your emails (marketing), and had a meeting with a sales rep (sales), you might want to send them a time-limited offer to give them the final push to put their credit card through.

Integrated Reporting

Ever feel like you have so much business data, but you’re still somehow in the dark? Maybe your sales data lives in one software, while your marketing software lives in another. With so much data coming in, it sometimes feels so overwhelming that you just keep up the guessing game.

When everything’s integrated, reporting becomes so much more powerful. You get real-time data about how a contact or customer is interacting with your business — across all channels. So instead of having a narrow view of a contact’s action, you see the big picture — which makes your future communication with the contact so much more personalized and helpful.

Wrap-Up

If there’s one take-away I want you to have gained from this article, it's this: Automation is powerful, but integrated automation is POWERFUL. When you’ve got your sales and marketing teams communicating with each other and sharing information automatically, you’ve set the stage for an unmatched customer experience that turns your customers into your biggest fans.

Need a hand connecting your sales and marketing efforts so that your business functions as one cohesive whole?