The Benefits of Marketing Automation: It’s Not Just for Marketing

You’ve heard the hype around marketing automation. It automates repetitive tasks, improves audience targeting, and ultimately helps marketing teams do more with less. The question isn’t, “what is marketing automation?” The question is, “are the benefits worth the cost?” 

Automation isn’t just for marketing departments. Leadership teams, sales departments, and customer service reps have a lot to gain. 

In this post, we’ll discuss how the benefits of marketing automation extend to leadership, sales, and even customer service so you can understand its total impact.

How Leadership Benefits from Automation

Leadership teams need to have a bird’s eye view of the business. Keeping a pulse on the high-level trends and patterns that develop is necessary to keeping the company moving in the right direction.

Marketing automation gives department heads and executives valuable access into performance data, allowing leadership teams to track revenue goals, maximize productivity, and ultimately make smarter decisions based on real data.

Some of the most attractive benefits of marketing automation for leadership include:

• Reduced staffing costs: Marketing automation makes teams more efficient and allows you to accomplish more with fewer resources. This means that leadership teams can scale their marketing efforts and create a greater impact without having to increase staff size. 
• Marketing and sales alignment: Automation platforms capture vital marketing and sales data, such as campaign performance, deals created, revenue attribution, and more. All this valuable data in one place leads to better coordination between marketing and sales teams, allowing leaders to align their goals toward company objectives.
• Increased scalability: When creating a new process for your business, it is important to question how scalable it will be. If a process is too cumbersome to perform at scale, your business will have a hard time expanding. By automating high volume, rules-based tasks, marketing automation makes it easy to execute these processes at scale. As an extra bonus, you may also reduce employee turnover rates and create a healthier, more profitable work environment. 

How Sales Benefits from Automation

According to HubSpot, more than 40% of salespeople say that prospecting is the most difficult part of their job. Think of how much time your sales team is wasting by talking to unqualified leads.

One of the main benefits of marketing automation for sales teams is the ability to create a lead scoring system that identifies which leads are the warmest and which ones need more nurturing. 

This means that sales reps don’t have to waste their time on cold leads, instead focusing their efforts on having meaningful conversations with qualified SQLs. 

Consider how automation can benefit sales teams in the following ways: 

• Better lead scoring: Specific behaviors and actions result in a “lead score” that increases or decreases based on a user’s interactions with your business. For example, viewing a pricing page, opening (or not opening) emails, visiting your website multiple times within a given timeframe, and other criteria can help sales teams gauge a prospect’s interest level and act accordingly. 
• Higher close rates: Automating follow-up sequences, creating deal pipelines, and other use cases for sales automation can reduce friction in the sales process and create higher close rates. According to Forrester, B2B teams using automation increase their sales pipeline contribution, on average, by 10%.
• Faster sales cycle: Automatic emails and messaging bots assist with routing opportunities to contacts and reducing friction throughout the sales process. More immediate follow-ups and fewer missed opportunities mean more closed deals and shorter sales cycles.

How Customer Service Benefits From Automation

Perhaps the most unspoken beneficiaries of marketing automation are customer service departments. Customer service is often one of the most underappreciated arms of business operations, and that’s a shame because existing customers matter too. Sixty one percent of SMBs report that more than half their revenue comes from repeat customers – so you better treat your customer service department well!

Here are some of the ways that automation can make your customer service reps – and your customers – happier:

• Automated responses: Automation tools such as chatbots ease the burden with autoresponders and FAQs to help route potential customers to what they need. Chatbots have been shown to save up to 30% of customer support costs via Chatbots Life.
• Reduced workload: Everyday questions can now be handled in various ways versus talking to someone on the phone. Ease your employees’ stress by offering multiple communication routes – this fosters a culture of better engagements with customers and provides better work-life balance for your employees.

It’s Not Just for Marketing – Everybody Wins

The benefits of marketing automation extend far beyond the marketing department to create an overall healthier and more scalable business. Leadership, sales, and even customer service departments have a lot to gain, as well.

If you want to learn more about the benefits of marketing automation and how it can help you grow your business, download your free Growth Stack Guide below.