Are you aware that poor workplace communication causes a loss of nearly $37 billion annually? Furthermore, when Forbes surveyed approximately 1,000 sales reps, it turned out that sales people only spend 35% of their time selling. This does not have to be the case!
In the world of abundant automation tools to pick from, digital marketing teams can actually help sales teams improve their performance – they should bring in automation tools and support sales through setting up smart communication workflows, which seamlessly combine the power of marketing, lead nurturing and sales. In essence, today’s marketing must create a corridor for sales through the use of automated tools. Businesses grow when sales teams operate at full capacity – this is precisely where automated communication workflows prove useful; they streamline processes in a manner that are timely and impactful, including –
- creation of tasks
- creation of notifications for completion, modification or delay in tasks (team leaders can see the status of each deliverable in real-time – no more guessing games!)
- faster handling of customer inquiries
- setting business meeting reminders + follow-ups promptly
- cross-selling effectively
- targeting the right customer with the right offers (hyper-segmenting)
- monitoring how each member of the sales team is performing
- automatic data entry & segmentation as leads are captured in real-time
- auto-assigning of leads to different sales reps, minimizing loss of time
Wondering what sort of action workflows your sales team can setup? While the possibilities are endless, here are three scenarios to help get you started –
1. Lead Nurturing
A study by Harvard Business Review indicated that 26.1% of leads receive follow-ups within 5 minutes. And, as you probably already know, 50% of sales go to whichever vendor responds first. Why miss out on a golden opportunity? For B2B leads who take a particular action, such as filling out a request form or downloading a case study, you can trigger a notification for a sales rep to contact the lead ASAP, while sending an automated email to the lead with a special offer. Likewise, if a lead is visiting a particular page on your Website, such as products, services or pricing, you can set-up an automated action to trigger a pop-up to draw his attention to a particular call-to-action.
2. Abandoned Cart
Triggers and actions can be set up to reduce abandoned cart syndrome on Ecommerce sites. If you find a large number of customers abandoning the cart before making the purchase, an auto trigger pop-up can present a special offer to the customer or send a response to the sales rep in real time. The sales teams can follow up with visitors through personalized email messages and increase conversion rates through continuous engagement of customers with the brand.
3. Cross Selling
Sales teams can target existing clients by cross selling them other products and services. But instead of doing these tasks manually, which can be time consuming and inefficient, they can set up follow-up messages, feedbacks and surveys to pique consumer interest and prompt engagement for selling.
Automated communication workflows are the way forward for businesses worldwide, not only because they are cost-effective and versatile, but also because they are highly scalable. In particular, small and mid-size companies can particularly benefit from adopting marketing automation to power up their sales – while pricing and user-interface might have been a challenge in the past, today there are many tools like Zoho One which have successfully solved both of these problems! The Zoho One suite is extremely intuitive, connected and omnichannel, easily allowing marketing teams to provide a seamless workflow to sales teams to connect, nurture and close contracts. To find out more, contact us right here.
