Many companies will get a robust CRM and marketing automation system and believe their campaigns will be capable of moving mountains. If you’re a sales and marketing nerd, it can be entertaining to fall into the advanced automation campaign bottomless pit. But most small business owners don’t have the knowledge or the time to spend many days on campaign development.

Marketing automation: What is it?

This enables you to construct email campaigns while focusing on other business-related tasks. Depending on the situation, these can be tailored and utilized to nurture your prospects until they are prepared to make a purchase. By ensuring that your leads’ behaviors are tracked and recorded, as well as your interactions with them from wherever on your team, when you combine your automation with a CRM, you gain even more advantages.

Your CRM may grade your leads and let you know which ones are prepared for you to contact and attempt to close based on the information provided by your automation sequences. The best part is that, once these systems are in place and working for you, they take care of themselves in the background, guiding your leads through the sales funnel rather than allowing them to fall through the cracks. When it comes to following up on leads and guiding potential customers through the conversion funnel, automation may help marketers save a ton of time.

Customer relationship management and customer data platform software are frequently integrated to make products work. Marketers can customize the messages or information they deliver to leads by using automation solutions. They can also automate standard responses and schedule communications. These solutions can significantly boost the sales and marketing teams’ productivity for companies with huge customer databases.

Personal sales follow-up: what is it?

You should follow up with a sales call after your initial pitch to compel the potential customer to act. The two most common methods for carrying out sales follow-ups are by phone and email. Many salespeople must have the capacity to master sales follow-up. Most of them do not follow up effectively.

According to a Brevet study, an average of five follow-ups are required to close 80 percent of sales. However, 44% of sales representatives only follow up with a lead once before giving up. After four follow-ups, 94 percent of salespeople give up.

Effective follow-up strategies for sales that you should know!

Always specify what comes after.

Not articulating the prospect’s next steps in the process clearly is a wrong move. If you agree to contact the prospect again in a week or two, and if they claim they need some time to review your offer with their team, then do so. And if your product demo went well and they showed interest, schedule a follow-up contact right away to further the process.

Take your time.

The simplest way to irritate and turn off a prospect is not to follow up too frequently, but rather to space your follow-ups too far apart. Purchasing decisions can take a while, and this is especially true when the product or service is expensive. As a result, you generally shouldn’t count on prospects to decide right away or even tomorrow.

Therefore, when we follow up, we need to be cognizant of lengthier lead times. When selling B2B, numerous stakeholders are frequently involved in the decision-making process. Your follow-ups should not be spaced exactly according to a formula. In most cases, once a month is not frequently enough, and every day will be far too frequently.

Understanding your prospect’s timing will help you space out your follow-ups in the best way possible. Consider the situation where you host. An additional piece of advice is to follow up at the appropriate moment.

Keep it concise.

Your prospects are busy folks. They don’t have time for convoluted emails, drawn-out phone conversations, or protracted meetings. Instead, get right to the topic and make your follow-ups succinct and direct. A follow-up email should contain no more than six lines in total.

Additionally, a follow-up phone call should normally not go over 10 minutes. It does not sound very lengthy, does it? Be direct because you only have a little window of opportunity to capture your prospect’s interest and motivate them to act.

Make use of various follow-up techniques.

Don’t limit yourself to merely using the phone and email. Naturally, you’ll find someone on every social media site you can think of, but if you’re connected on a business site, there’s no reason you can’t use it to follow up. In summary, experiment with various follow-up techniques if you’re unsure about someone’s preferences.

People have various communication preferences, so what catches one person’s attention may be overlooked by another. Appreciate someone’s choice of communication channel if they make one clear. If you phone a prospect repeatedly after they’ve indicated they want to conduct all business via email, you won’t win their favor.

With each follow-up, add value.

Your prospects don’t want to feel as though they are the target of an aggressive sales pitch, despite the fact that you are a salesperson. Instead, keep the prospect interested in every follow-up and make sure to add value for them. You can achieve better results this way. To put it another way, it’s not even about you or your product. They are the focus.

The following are some strategies for adding value to your follow-ups:

• Start by asking the potential customer how they are and how business is going. In general, you should try to remember one or two key details about each potential customer. Simply keeping in mind personal details and demonstrating your concern might assist in creating the kind of human connection that stimulates business.
• Keep track of the challenges and pain areas the prospect is seeking to solve in your notes, and always focus the conversation on these issues. Keep in mind that you’re not merely selling a product. You are marketing a fix for an issue.
• In your follow-up email, include a link to a pertinent article, blog post, or video. The content must be directly related to the prospect and the issues they have disclosed to you. By giving them useful content, you show that you want a long-term relationship, not just a one-time sale.
• Inform them of a special deal or temporary discount.

Reconnecting with a prospect you haven’t spoken to in a while can be easy with this strategy. Keep in mind that “value” need not necessarily be monetary. Simply make sure that every time you speak to someone, you are providing them with something helpful.

Subject lines are crucial.

The subject line of your email can make or break the outcome of your follow-up if you are sending it. As a result, you must capture their interest sufficiently to compel them to open your email in the first place. It won’t use a generic subject line, such as “Just checking in” or “follow up.”

These are simple to dismiss or toss right into the trash. You must instead create something alluring that will pique their interest in what you have to offer. Personalizing your subject line with the recipient’s name may be the most crucial step. According to one study, this raised open rates by almost 29%.

The following are some more excellent practices for follow-up subject lines:

• Be succinct, direct, and conversational in your writing.
• Establish a sense of urgency. This could be done by mentioning a specific time or a one-week-only promotion.
• Post a direct query. Create good opening lines for emails that you want the recipient to read and reply to.
• Make it obvious that the communication provides useful information. Value is demonstrated by subject lines like “saw this video and thought of you” or “thought this essay could be valuable to you.”

Take the time to create an enticing subject line since getting them to open your email is the first obstacle you must overcome.

Don’t be afraid to do follow-ups consistently.

This stage of the sales process causes a lot of stress for salespeople. This is due to their concern that excessive follow-up may anger the potential customer, make them appear spammy, or possibly result in them losing the transaction. However, you need to know that a definite “no” is a gift.

This allows you to quit wasting time on them and move on to a prospect who is actually interested in what you have to offer. If you start to see following up as a necessary part of getting to know a potential client, you’ll start to see its value and lose your fear of it.

How can marketing automation be made effective?

The leads that the automation technologies use must be of a high caliber for marketing automation to be effective. Automation cannot be employed in a dispersed manner, as Lechner-Becker advises. Before letting automation software loose on any database, the marketing team should carefully check the quality of the leads in your CRM system and screen prospects before letting automation software loose on any database.

Final Thoughts

CRM and email marketing automation perform different tasks but complement each other greatly. CRM maintains data on the prospect and their position in the sales cycle while marketing automation tracks top-of-funnel actions to drive qualified prospects to sales. Since marketing automation and CRM work well together, it is important to use a data orchestration solution or other technology to make sure that only clean data moves between them.

Martin Gessner

Martin Gessner is the Founder of Focus on Force.

He has spent over 10 years working in various Salesforce roles including business analyst, project manager, consultant and solutions architect. Along the way he has earned twelve certifications, published "The Salesforce Career Playbook", and helps Salesforce professionals learn more about Salesforce, develop their career and prepare for certifications.