Sales Automation vs. Marketing Automation2
By Nivedita Verma for Radius360x
What is Sales Automation?
Sales automation refers to using software that automates repetitive and manual tasks. This helps the sales team to focus on generating and closing more leads. Sales automation tools can help you automate follow-ups, schedule payment reminders and invoices for your customers, nurture your sales pipeline, etc.
Benefits of sales automation
- Automating follow-ups: Sales automation tools can help you differentiate hot leads and cold leads so that your sales team can automate follow ups with them.
- Automating outbound emails: Your sales team won’t be under the burden of sending outbound emails manually if you are using a sales automation system.
- Integrating sales call: Calls with potential or current customers can be recorded and transcribed so that they can be analyzed and reflected upon later.
- Schedule demo: After leads are showing interest, the sales team can create personalized content for them. The sales team can give demo of the product and see how they engage with it.
- Close the deal: You can contact the relevant people with offers that are best suited for them. Sales automation process helps you to know and analyze your prospects in a better way. This helps to close the deal in an efficient and speedy manner.
- Reducing manual efforts and cost: Main purpose of sales automation is to reduce the manual efforts of employees and the cost of lead generation.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation refers to automating the marketing tasks and processes using software and web-based services. In marketing automation, tedious and repetitive manual tasks are performed by technology. This boosts campaign performance and increases campaign speed.
Marketing automation includes automating email marketing campaigns, SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, etc.
Benefits of marketing automation:
- Create a marketing client database: It helps you to build a database of your target audience. This helps when you want to create touchpoints with your potential customers.
- Automate routine marketing tasks: This saves a lot of time for the organization. For example, tasks like posting content on social media or engaging with users based on their level of activity.
- Nurture and track leads: Marketing automation tools help you to track leads and nurture them in a way that the conversion rate increases.
- SEO and marketing automation: Integrating SEO with your marketing campaigns can help you generate inbound leads organically. SEO gives a boost to your online presence and increases searchability for your business.
- Integration with CRM tools: CRM stands for customer relationship management. Marketing automation integrated with CRM tools can help you get valuable insights about the customers. This way you can build relevant campaigns that get you better results.
- Segment audiences: Once you have got hold of your target audience, you can categorize them on the basis of their preferences, interests, engagement, on-site activities, etc. This helps to engage with them in a more organized and targeted way.
The difference between Sales and Marketing Automation
Sales Automation vs Marketing Automation
- Processes: Streamlining the sales pipeline by facilitating internal workflows VS Managing marketing touchpoints and making sure that each prospect is receiving information about the product
- Responsibility: To execute the ultimate conversion steps like making calls with prospects VS Nurture leads in such a way that increases the conversion rate.
- Purpose: Close Sales deals VS Create leads for Sales
- Implementation Stage: Can be skipped if the business is new VS Can be applied to every stage of the business
- Data: Statistics about prospects’ activities in the sales funnel vs Data and performing metrics related to marketing campaigns.
Integrating both for a more powerful business
If your business is new then starting with marketing automation will give you the necessary boost to nurture leads but after a while, integrating sales and marketing automation would prove to be the most productive. Automated sales follow-up offers targeted, personalized communication for sales teams following up on successful marketing campaigns that were done through marketing automation. A powerful force for revenue creation is created by using these two tools together, in the right way.
While combining sales and marketing automation, you can also opt for a whole automated CRM system. An automated CRM system consists of marketing, sales, and service automation to boost the journey through a sales funnel for customers and puts lead generation and deal closing on autopilot.
