There’s no way around it. Marketing and sales go together like peanut butter and jelly. Integrating your processes is vital to your business’ growth. When one team is misaligned with the other, it’s easy to fall short of the full potential of your ongoing marketing campaigns.

Although alignment between Marketing and Sales teams remains paramount to the success of any business, this balance is notoriously difficult to achieve. Even in the best-case scenario, employees can quickly waste time due to repetitive or redundant tasks and needless miscommunication. 

Marketing and sales automation can keep your teams aligned without breaking the bank. In this post, we share how automation can bridge the gap between marketing and sales to generate leads that convert and explain how the Wrk platform can make this transition seamless, boosting your team's performance well into the future. 

Keeping it together

25% of businesses say their Marketing and Sales teams are either misaligned or rarely aligned. Separating the two can be costly when these teams are best when married together.

Unsurprisingly, the inability to communicate effectively can lead to countless missed opportunities. Chronically misaligned teams are routinely sacrificing potential growth. Marketing automation can ensure you capitalize on new and existing campaigns. Evidence has shown how much marketing and sales automation can pay off: properly aligned Sales and Marketing teams can generate up to 208% more revenue and see 38% higher sales win rates. 

In addition to the stark increase in revenue, sales and marketing automation also greatly increase time spent on value-add activities. Streamlining communication makes exchanging information about potential leads, new insights, and strategies easier. These teams can skillfully manage campaigns, follow up with prospective and current clients, and close new leads when aligned.

Automation makes coordinating, and communicating easier and ensures that important opportunities don't fall through the cracks. With smooth integration between existing software, your teams can be on the same page. Ultimately, every campaign will be optimized to suit the customer’s experience.

Tracking the customer journey 

Sales and marketing automation can make it easier to meet customers at every stage of their journey. With integrations with CRM platforms like Hubspot, contacts can be automatically labelled as leads, marketing qualified leads, subscribers, and more based on criteria you set. 

With automation, you can quickly determine where a contact came from so that you know which methods are more effective than others. You can therefore adjust your efforts and budget accordingly. Wrk’s Lead Nurturing Wrkflows lay out how any lead can be classified and followed up with personalized marketing without much intervention from the Marketing or Sales team. This frees up time for creatives to brainstorm new content and marketing strategies.

Moreover, the lead labeling process can be quickly followed by assigning leads to specific sales representatives. This ensures no contact details are lost, and all potential customers are followed up with as soon as possible. Marketing teams can receive this information simultaneously, preparing them to develop targeted marketing campaigns and emails while existing leads are nurtured.

Meeting customers where they are at in every stage of the customer journey means they can consistently receive materials that best suit their interests and needs. Marketing and sales automation makes this feat possible, and teams reap the rewards.

Creating a personalized customer experience 

Personalized sales and marketing campaigns are as important as carefully tracking the customer journey. 80% of consumers are likelier to do business with companies that offer a personalized experience. Scaling personalized marketing and sales endeavors is necessary and paramount to a business's ability to compete. 

Personalization can be the difference between keeping and losing a lead. Consumers who report that personalized experiences are appealing are 10 times more likely to be valuable customers. This amount is anticipated to make more than 15 transactions annually and shop 3 times more frequently. 

When you tailor offers to fit a customer's physical location, interests, and age group, everything your business offers becomes more timely and relevant. By making purchases effortless, consumers are more likely to follow through with them. This is great for business.

Our Wrkflows can take the pressure off Sales and Marketing teams by identifying use cases unique to each contact, generating a product sheet with those use cases, and sending a personalized email. 

Our Personalized Email Marketing Wrkflows can also help your Marketing team create email marketing campaigns designed to target your individual customers with tailored recommendations and offerings. 

By offering a personalized customer journey, you can improve the overall experience for your clients, increase brand loyalty, and drive revenue.  Marketing and sales automation makes it possible to scale personalized marketing materials while freeing up time for teams to brainstorm new, creative ways to approach these campaigns.

Bigger and better data 

Today’s most competitive companies know how to use the data they have on hand. Sales and Marketing teams need to manage a massive amount of data effectively to optimize sales. Teams can misplace anything from contact information to various success metrics without a streamlined workflow. When important information slips through the cracks, the mistake can be costly.

Marketing and sales automation makes it possible to translate your data into actionable insights that your team can use to improve their processes. For example, suppose you are already using sign-up forms to gather customer data. In that case, automation can help organize the information so you can use it in personalized campaigns. 

Reports state that as much as 90% of the data businesses are tasked with managing is unstructured, and 95% of businesses express that struggling to manage unstructured data has been a significant cost for their business. Keeping track of data is a fundamental part of maintaining peak performance. Marketing and sales automation can help provide structure to traditionally unwieldy data by offering a streamlined workflow. Wrk’s Market Research Wrkflow exemplifies how you can manage existing data swiftly to achieve greater results in every campaign.

Beyond keeping your data organized, automation can measure KPIs to evaluate what’s working and what’s not from a marketing and sales standpoint. With clarity on key metrics, teams can coordinate to improve processes. You can think of automation as the glue that holds these two teams together. It can strengthen each department and your business in the long run.

Planning for tomorrow

The struggle to stay aligned and make the most of the data on hand is not the only time-consuming task burdening teams. Automation in sales and marketing can save time on repetitive tasks that detract from your team’s ability to keep leads from faltering in their journey. They provide personalized marketing materials and collect and organize data to inform your future marketing decisions. 

According to a Smartsheet study, 40% of workers surveyed spend at least a quarter of their workweek on repetitive tasks. Instead, you can spend your valuable time strategizing today to convert leads faster tomorrow. 

Save time so your Marketing and Sales teams can do more of what they do best. Use that time to develop creative, inspired campaigns to grow your business. The level of communication afforded by proper automation can help your teams remain well aware of what's next in the pipeline and stay on top of the next steps. 

You can modify marketing and sales automation workflows to suit your business’s needs and are flexible enough to adapt to new processes and goals. This prevents your teams from getting stuck in a rut of difficult-to-change processes and allows them to adapt to ever-changing market demands.

Marketing and sales automation: together forever

While it’s no surprise that chronic disorganization can leave your teams shorthanded, knowing that automation solutions are painless may be a relief. Automation is the glue that makes it stick. And boy do we know automation.

Visit our Marketing and Sales hubs to learn how the Wrk platform can help you. Check it out today!