Marketing automation brings sales and marketing together. The reports of sales and marketing dysfunction are greatly exaggerated.

A survey by the CMO Council and its Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE) found that less than 20 percent of respondents regard their sales and marketing organizations as extremely collaborative; while among those who have CRM applications, only 13 percent view the application as highly valued and widely deployed, and 50 percent said they had trouble finding customer account data, did not have enough information, or had none at all.

Another survey from marketing automation vendor Eloqua shows that marketing and sales are becoming more closely aligned. More than 90 percent rated the relationship between their sales and marketing departments as “okay” or “excellent.” This alignment is due to increasing sophistication of marketers and salespeople who can now monitor the behavior of customers – what did customer ABC look at online, what did they download, how many times did they visit, etc.

This sophistication is also driven by a shared workflow language with common definitions. Where marketing once considered a “lead” anybody that registered for anything, now there is a growing realization, forced by better workflow and rules descriptions in technology, that the term “lead” should only be applied to people who are ready to buy.

 

WHY MACON RAINE FOR MARKETING AUTOMATION?

Every step of the marketing process can be improved with testing, segmentation, lead scoring and analysis. Leading marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, Act-On and Eloqua are powerful – but useless unless used by trained marketing personnel. To fully leverage the power of marketing automation, it takes power users – backed by consistent, compelling content – to produce powerful results.

If you are looking for marketing automation talent, it can be a challenge to find trained professionals to manage leads and operate the software. Developing compelling content as well as effective lead management processes requires talented copywriters and designers that also understand the intricacies of CRM and segmentation models.

Let us help you with:

• Target markets, buyer personas and messaging
• Understand the sales process and sales cycle
• Understand the sales funnel concept and buy-cycle stages
• Understand the demand generation and lead nurturing process
• Reach agreement on buy-cycle stages, including lead scoring thresholds and sales-ready events and triggers
• Understand and agree to the handoff between marketing and sales with respect to segmentation criteria and CRM integration issues
• Provide feedback (or closed loop marketing) to the marketing automation system (and team) based on sales engagements and status updates
• Increase the number and percentage of qualified leads passed to sales
• Increase conversion rates for demand generation and lead nurturing
• Reduce the number of leads lost and missed sales opportunities
• Automatically move leads through the sales funnel based on the content they consume and interactions with your emails and website
• Reduce the sales cycle and churn, while increasing lifetime value
• Improve the overall effectiveness of both sales and marketing teams
• Enable Revenue Performance Management to track revenue-based KPIs and ROI
• Evaluate account-based marketing approaches

Macon Raine is a Chicago-based B2B marketing automation and CRM agency. Our team of designers, writers, and CRM analysts works with you to automate your marketing processes. We do this by following a well-defined marketing automation process that starts with clean CRM data.

This includes the following services:

• Ideation of campaigns
• Creation of emails, landing pages, and confirmation pages
• Development of personalized content, calls-to-action, and progressive (or smart forms)
• Optimization of calls-to-action on content pages including blogs and social media
• Ongoing testing of all elements of campaigns
• Customization of lead scoring criteria based on a prospect’s interaction with email, web pages and other information provided via forms
• Workflows that automatically adjust based on prospect behavior
• Integration with CRM so the marketing and sales organization work from “one version of the truth”
• Attribution and KPI tracking

Want to learn more? Get in touch. Contact us today.