If you play tennis or golf you will quickly learn how great the sweet spot can be. The ball comes off the racket or club and sails away almost effortlessly. The professionals make it look easy. Having been in Fortune 500 sales for 15 years selling mainframes, CAD/CAM and workstations, I can recall times when I breezed by annual sales goals in the first quarter. I can also recall literally having seizures early on while giving my first corporate overviews to prospects. I was self-conscious and had only a shred of product knowledge despite the corporate training.
As time went on, my sales skills improved as did my product knowledge. Those two elements, combined with qualified prospects spelled the sweet spot. How we get these elements to coalesce in a marketing automation system is the challenge. The development of this model relies on replacing the sales person and imbuing the system with their sales skills and product knowledge. Eric Keiles and Mike Lieberman authored ‘Fire Your Sales Team Today: Then Rehire Them As Sales Guides In Your New Revenue Department’ and is a definitive tome for this approach whereby a new order of reality is created and traditional sales people become ‘sales advisors’ engaging with contacts that have been pre-warmed or jump started by engaging with the system prior to personal attention.
Businesses that are service oriented and have recurring revenue opportunities such as maintenance agreements to support warranties can especially benefit from this approach. Automation can be used to facilitate reminders and easy renewals with e-commerce links for payments. This can be taken a step further and on site visit protocol can include equipment audits that ascertain the manufacturing dates. End of life predictions based on the make and model can be easily done and legacy automations can be setup to remind customers when end of life is near to harvest replacements. Service oriented companies such as HVAC dealers can also leverage the system for requests for reviews (review automation).
One edge the system has over the sales person is that it is not commission (incentive) based. If you have ever been car shopping for an economy model and had the salesman pitch a luxury coupe you understand the turn off a mismatch can be. When a contact views a particular item or goes to a particular catalog page, we can track, report and act on their interest by matching it up with the response. Site and event tracking in modern marketing automation systems easily tip us off to interest and consequently correlates the correct response.
Holistically, the system goals are to increase sales while bridging the ‘trust gap’. The marketing automation system frames in the elements and creates conditions for sales success by educating and servicing the contact. At the same time, it reduces the float time between touches and encourages co-creation of solutions. By reducing the feeling of separation, the system builds trust.
About Active Campaign: Active Campaign combines all aspects of small business marketing into a single & easy to use platform. Seamlessly create beautiful & engaging emails, utilize social media marketing, learn more about your contacts, and utilize marketing automation technology that used to be unreachable for small businesses. Over 100,000 users trust Active Campaign to help grow their business
About Eye Fuze: We provide practical and affordable marketing solutions around Active Campaign, the all-in-one marketing platform. We build your marketing machine to automate and streamline your business and offer diverse consulting and programming ranging from general coaching or problem solving to complex automations and content development. We also offer integration assistance for other applications, website development, content creation, site tracking and more.
