How to Leverage Marketo to Boost Sales?

Marketing automation software is a very beneficial technology for any sales team. But surprisingly, automation tools are not used by sales teams as much as by marketing teams. often, sales teams do not consider using or learning to use the marketing platforms, whereas the marketing teams leverage it to generate, nurture, and qualify leads. 

Instead of exploring how an automation platform can benefit sales teams, they continue relying on manual efforts of sending prospects one-off emails and identify the right companies and employees to target based on their guesswork. 

If they would give a thought to and take time to learn and understand how a marketing automation platform such as Marketo can help them, they can save a huge amount of time and effort in looking for qualified leads. But why are they still not using Marketo or any other marketing automation tool to facilitate their sales efforts? How can Marketo extend additional help to sales reps? 

The sales team can remove the guesswork involved in targeting by starting to listen to prospects using Marketo. Sales reps can start listening to what interests their prospects, what they discuss about similar products or services, and how prospects engage with emails and other communications from the brand. Marketo can also help sales reps track when leads are ready to talk to them and optimize their sales pitch based on customers’ and prospects’ interests.

If you are thinking of adopting Marketo for your sales team, then check out these following five tips to make the best use of the Marketo automation platform to improve your sales efforts and boost conversions.

1. Timely Feedback on Lead Quality

Marketo automation platform needs feedback on what can benefit your sales team and what does not work to turn it into a more productive platform for your company. Without any feedback from sales reps, the software will assume that most leads are good enough to pass on to the sales team.  

Accelerate the speed of the system’s optimization process, your sales reps should continue giving feedback. If your sales team is continuously receiving leads from marketing teams that are not sales-ready and not nurtured properly, then the sales team will waste their efforts without any result. Often leads fill out or ask for product demo forms, and those leads are sent to the sales reps, which may or may not convert eventually. In such cases, sales reps need to input their valuable feedback and revise the lead scoring protocol of Marketo to prevent the system from sending those leads unless those leads reach the score to be sales-qualified.

Based on consistent feedback from the sales team, the automation system will start passing great quality leads and inform the marketing team that they are good leads. Once your sales reps start defining good leads for the automation platform, Marketo will start identifying the features and uniqueness that construct a good lead and find more good quality leads for your sales team.

2. Monitor the Browsing Pattern of Website Visitors

Your Marketo automation system is capable of tracking website visitors your sales team wants to follow up. All anonymous visitors who browse your website are known as anonymous leads. Later, the automation tool tracks visitors’ location, employment details, business or organization, their browsing behaviors until they navigate to fill out any form that opens the window to know more about those leads. Around 98% of site visitors belong to this category, and they hardly fill out a form. Around 70% of those website visitors may leave or bounce from the site after just one click. 

These types of visitors are not interested in your brand, product, or services. These leads will also never convert because they were not interested in the first place. Thus, around only 30% of all website visitors can be genuinely interested in your brand and might not have expressed interest in talking to anyone. That’s when the Marketo automation system can come in handy to look for them in the system. 

Marketo system comes with a sales insight tool that can provide you with the list of interested visitors and their company names. Remember, it is even better if you find different leads from the same organizations because they can facilitate the conversion process.

3. Automate Follow-up Emails

The manual process of sending follow-up emails involves maintaining dates and times of emails sent in spreadsheets to track the last time when you followed up a lead. At the same time, sales reps also have to write those follow-up emails to the leads manually. At this rate of manual efforts, reps can target not more than a few emails per hour. 

However, now modern reps can leverage Marketo to automate this follow-up process wherein they just have to send the first prospect email, and the marketing automation system itself can track when the first email is sent and follow up using personalized, targeted, sales-focused emails within a stipulated period. Thus, Marketo can enable your sales team to accelerate the follow-up process so that the team can target as much as hundreds of prospects every hour. 

You can set the system not to send prospecting emails on weekends and to personalize emails beyond “first name,” “company names.” All you need to do is align with your marketing team to discuss how they can help set up the process and start with a few campaigns based on lead data and verticals.

4. Practice Strategic Marketing

Now that we have discussed the importance of marketing and sales team alignment let us show you why you need to focus on this to improve your strategic follow-up process. In Marketo, every lead and every action is monitored and measured based on pre-planned evaluation metrics. 

Therefore, aligning with your marketing team can benefit you with more lead insights and lead scores to understand which products and solutions they are more interested in, even if they are interested, whether they are yet ready to talk to the sales team or needs more nurturing and optimize the sales pitch based on these insights and information. 

Consider aligning with your demand generation team to discuss how your sales reps can work with them more closely and also how sales teams can extend any help. The joint pursuit of pursuing leads across different stages of the customer journey can drastically enhance your conversion capability.

5. Target “out of office” Replies

Do your marketing team schedule prospecting email delivery regularly, and those emails are targeted to send replies to the sales team? If your sales team receives plenty of “out of office” responses from most of the recipients, then save those responses. Most of those email replies contain full contact information, which you would not have been able to collect otherwise. 

Chances are those “out of office” replies may also contain a mobile number or any working telephone number that was not listed under the database. More than the email address and telephone numbers, you will also get data on when those leads will be back to the office so that you can ask them to set a convenient time to talk, ask them what they want to know, and can have conversations with them.

Conclusion

Marketo-savvy salespeople can identify the scope of improving their sales efforts and accelerating the conversion process to increase reach and conversion using the marketing automation platform. 

Are you about to start using Marketo for your sales team and need more hands-on tips to get started and set up a sales process with Marketo? You can reach our Marketo certified team to find out how to smarten up the sales process and make sure the platform is working for you. You can use our contact us page or drop us a “Hi” at info@marrinadecisions.com. If you are on social media, you can DM us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn