marketing automation vs sales automation
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Sales Automation Vs. Marketing Automation – Understanding the Differences

As a business owner, you need to implement growth hacks to improve your marketing and sales processes. It is important to send personalized messages to customers and build strategic campaigns to encourage your customers to take the intended actions and keep them engaged. 

The two vital tools you need for your steady growth hacks are marketing automation and sales automation. These tools keep your marketing and sales processes up and running with lesser manual interventions so that you and your teams can free time for strategic and creative pursuits. So, what are marketing automation and sales automation? How should you use them? And what the heck is the difference between the two? Let us show you the differences and how implementing these tools will benefit your business. 

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation uses software and web-based services to execute, manage, and automate marketing tasks and processes. Marketing automation features purpose-built tools and applications to boost your campaign performance and speed by replacing tedious and repetitive manual marketing processes. 

The best way to learn about the marketing automation platform is to walk through its various features and functionalities. 

Marketing Intelligence refers to the use of tracking codes to monitor online behaviors.

Business Development or automated business development relies on email marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and content marketing.

Advanced Workflow Automation encompasses the complete automation of internal marketing processes and functions.

The latest marketing automation systems usually sync with sales automation systems, such as a CRM platform. Automating the aspects mentioned earlier in marketing operations introduces a wide range of benefits. These include:

Create Quality Leads – Get a clear view of your B2B space and gain intel about your leads to clinch the advantage. With the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and quality content, you can reach and engage your target audience more effectively.

Scale Up Faster – What used to take years previously can now be done in a matter of months. For example, companies that use automation to manage their leads can expect 10 percent or more bump in revenue within 6 to 9 months, which is essential in current competitive markets.

Value for Money – Besides the time-saving benefits, the marketing team can also save money and resources. Lesser people must manage the marketing operations’ logistical and administrative aspects, regardless of how fast the company is growing.

What is Sales Automation?

The centerpiece of any sales automation platform is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, which helps organize, track, and nurture leads. When this crucial sales backbone is managed automatically with minimal human intervention (and errors), it introduces a wide range of benefits.

Automated Activity Logging – Performs all non-sales activities, including logging emails and phone calls automatically. These are also visible to all managers and stakeholders for future reference to avoid manually performing all these tedious administrative actions.

Automated Record Creation – Leads of varying sizes and forms visit your website, meet you at events, and engage with outbound activities such as email campaigns. Sales automation software can immediately generate CRM records when these activities happen.

Automated Communication – emails for sales followup can now be automated and sent at preset intervals. You can optimize these timings or intervals as per previous campaign performance data. You can also start automating all your meeting schedules with a sales automation system.

Automated Lead Management – Many sales automation tools allow managers to set automatic lead assignment rules based on their criteria, which reduces the number of little decisions that need to be taken in real-time, something that significantly improves productivity.

Automated Guidance – With automated guidance and reminders implemented in a CRM, sales reps will know what they have to do next to keep their deals moving forward. Thus, they can ensure that they have completed all the essential tasks on time. 

Sales automation creates the consistency necessary for a team to measure their sales funnel’s health and make improvements accurately. Furthermore, using a sales automation solution today can allow you to track a wide range of metrics that can optimize your performance.

Sales KPIs are used by the CEO, senior management team members, and the head of the sales team. Sales KPIs metrics include market penetration, total revenue, average lifetime value (LTV), net promoter score (NPS), year-on-year (YoY) growth, revenue by territory/market, and others.

Activity Sales Metrics are used by the head of the sales team and sales reps. Activity sales metrics include the number of calls made, the number of sent emails, the number of demos, the number of conversations, the number of scheduled meetings, and others.

Outreach Sales Metrics are used by the head of the sales team and sales development representatives (SDRs). Outreach sales metrics include various email sales metrics (open, response, and engagement rates), different phone sales metrics (such as prospects who move ahead, call-backs), and others. 

Channel Sales Metrics are used by the head of the sales team, sales development teams, and account managers. Channel Sales Metrics include various partner performance (revenue, margin, average deal size), and different partner customers’ stats (retention rate, average cross-sell, and upsell rate). 

Sales Productivity Metrics are used by account managers and customer success team members. Sales productivity metrics include time spent on selling, time spent on content, time spent on manual data entry, the average number of sales tools used daily, and others.

All in all, automating the sales activities provides all the stakeholders mentioned above with the opportunity to focus on what they do best – selling.

Marketing Automation vs. Sales Automation – what to choose?

Having both marketing and sales automation platforms can be ideal for your organization. However, you also have to look at the cost of implementation. It is essential to understand the differences between the two methodologies, which have different purposes for a wide range of scenarios. 

Marketing AutomationSales Automation
The purpose is to Create LeadsThe purpose is to Close Deals
The main actions include Build Client Base, Nurture Leads.The main actions include Track Lead Score, Close Deals.
The primary responsibility is the optimization of marketing flow. 
The primary responsibility is to make calls to schedule meetings with leads.
You can implement in all stages of the customer journey from demand generation to customer loyalty. 
If your business is new, you can start with a marketing automation platform without a sales automation system. 

Conclusion

So, which system do you need for your MarTech stack? Do you only need marketing automation or a sales automation system? Or do you need both the systems? In case you need professional assistance in making a well-informed decision with marketing automation and a sales automation system – you can directly talk to our experts using the chat box or say a “Hi” at experts@marrinadecisions.com. If you are active on social now, then you can simply DM us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – do you want!