Sales Enablement through Marketing Automation

This being a blog about sales enablement.

I’m going to skip the whole bit about its importance and get straight to the focus of this post – how you can enable your sales team with qualified, warm leads instead of having them wade their way through cold calls.

I’m writing this because we just finished testing it for our own clients.

So I’m going to walk you through the process of how to automate your entire online lead generation process.

CRM is Not Sales Enablement

Once your growth takes you past the Excel or Google Spreadsheets stage, you have to look at getting a CRM to manage leads.

But that’s not marketing automation. You still have to enter all the deals, activities, companies, names, organizations, and follow the flow as each lead progress through your buying funnel.

It’s not possible to manually manage this process without devoting a huge amount of your resources for what is essentially an administrative task.

The key to making a CRM work without eating up your sales budget is to automate the marketing process so that it directly generates sales qualified leads (SQLs), or at least warm leads that your sales team can convert at a much higher rate.

How to Automate Website Marketing

You can put a 1-800 number and hope your site visitors will call you.

You can add a web contact form and hope people will fill it in. It often happens if you have a good website and an even better product.

But there’s a better to ensure you engage your site visitors and have the lead dropped straight into your CRM without anyone entering anything into the system.

It’s called Click to Call, and all you have to do add a few lines of code into your template to make a widget show up on every page of your site asking people to enter their name and number to get a call back from you.

Click to call technology can track site visitors, provide information and analytics about the call and the lead’s requirements, and your sales team can have it all right in the palm of their hand before the call.

After the call, the lead gets entered directly into the CRM as a new deal. If it’s a repeat caller who has already been added into your CRM, it’ll be logged as a new activity.

Now you can do the same with your traditional contact mechanisms as well, in addition to having click to call technology on your site.

Get the forms to embed code from your CRM, and add it into the template or blog post HTML.

That takes about 2 minutes, and you will be able to track and pipe all the form data straight into the CRM as new inbound leads.

Similarly, you can easily track phone number clicks on your website, for calls made by visitors using mobile devices to access your site.

Use tracking code generated by using Google Tag Manager, and get a bit of developer help to include the click on the phone number as an event that gets sent to Google Analytics.

How to Automate Social Media and Email Lead Generation

It’s just as easy to integrate all the activity on your social channels as leads in your CRM.

There are plug-in and interface providers such as Automate.io that will help you generate integration interfaces between your CRM and any other marketing channel where you’re generating leads.

Similarly, Mailchimp will itself allow you to sync data between your CRM and your mailing list. New deals added to your CRM will show up as subscribers in your mailing list, and new subscribers added to the list can be piped into the CRM without any manual entry.

Do all this, and your leads will be instantly passed on to your sales team, without having to go through the process of being added to the CRM, dialed out and qualified by your SDRs, and then passed on to the sales team.

It takes days and sometimes weeks to get a lead into the hands of a sales rep. Meanwhile, your competitor has already contacted, qualified and closed the query into a sale.

So here’s the question – Are you doing sales enablement right with just a CRM?