Marketing automation boosts ROI for both sales and marketing, but it’s hard to get both teams to start using the technology. Use these expert strategies to help your sales and marketing teams adopt marketing automation, says Ilana Plumer, Senior Director of Marketing, RelationEdge. 

For the past few years, marketing automation evangelists have been facing push-back from sales and marketing stakeholders wary of the prospect of yet another digital platform.

Stay faithful, tech warrior, and you will be rewarded.

By helping your sales and marketing teams understand the vast benefits of marketing technology (martech), you can get both teams using it to convert more leads. A study by Walker Sands shows that resistance to marketing automation has dropped over the last two years, from 33% in 2016 to just 27% of marketers in 2018 saying they face internal resistance.

With the right strategy (and a few of the statistics here) you can help sales and marketing team members appreciate how martech will make them less stressed and more successful. Here are the key steps you can take to get marketing and sales on board with marketing automation.

Understand the Pain Points of Each Team

Remember, every interaction — particularly those at work — involves two or more people ultimately driven to protect their own time, energy and finances. It’s the law of the business jungle. If you want to win buy-in to marketing automation, knowing what your stakeholders struggle with is key.

Before touting any benefits of the technology, poll your sales and marketing personnel for ideas and insights into how their work gets done. Ask them what weaknesses exist in their processes or what support they feel would help them do their jobs more effectively. You can match this information with the abundant benefits marketing automation offers when you present your case.

Typically, the Holy Grail of challenges for sales include:

• Meeting quotas
• Expanding market share
• Increasing productivity
• Shortening sales cycle
• Qualifying leads appropriately
   

Their marketing counterparts typically struggle with:

• Generating leads and traffic
• Effectively nurturing leads
• Proving ROI of campaigns and technology tools
• Improving customer engagement
• Executing efficiently on ideas
   

Show How Marketing Automation Addresses Pain Points

Once you’ve compared the needs of your sales and marketing teams with everything marketing automation has to offer, you’re ready to present. Consider holding one meeting with both the sales and marketing teams. Meeting with both teams together helps each side understand the other’s challenges and opportunities. Marketing automation has the potential to bring marketing and sales teams closer, working toward the shared goal of increasing conversions and revenue.

In your meeting, emphasize how marketing automation can address each team’s pain points. Use vivid, personalized examples to strengthen your points and help employees visualize themselves benefitting from this tool.

For your sales team, marketing automation can:

• Turn cold calling into warm calling— Salespeople can see which collateral a lead has downloaded and what steps they’ve taken through the website. With insight into the prospect’s interests and hesitations, they can better answer specific questions.
• Help reps reach prospects at the right times — Salespeople can be notified when a prospect downloads content, views a pricing page, or submits a form. This real-time information allows them to connect with a prospect when the brand or offer is top-of-mind.
• Deliver better leads — Rather than wasting time with unqualified leads, sales can work on closing leads that have already shown interest and been nurtured by marketing campaigns.
• Facilitate lead-scoring— Companies that implement lead scoring may enjoy significantly higher close rates, revenue increases and revenue per deal increases.
• Remove tedious tasks — Freed from manual lead-scoring and baseline outreach, your sales team can focus on closing more sales.
• Produce important insights to share with marketing — Sales can share the content pieces that help them close the most sales, so marketing can replicate the types of content that are successful. They can also share common reasons for not closing a sale, enabling marketing to pivot strategies to address those pain points.

For marketing personnel, marketing automation can:

• Keep your brand top of mind with consumers — With automated and strategic email campaigns, marketers can reach out to consumers on a regular basis to keep your product and services fresh in their minds.
• Segment and nurture leads more effectively— Marketers can segment their target audience based on factors like demographics, interests, or past purchasing behavior. This enables them to send targeted messaging to nurture leads along the sales funnel.
• Improve targeting and personalization efforts— Personalization is the wave of the future as consumers expect brands to understand their needs and buying habits. Salesforce found that 66% of marketers pinpointed better targeting and personalization as the top benefit of marketing automation.  
• Collect data on campaign success— With advanced data and analytics, marketing can duplicate actions with high ROI, pinpoint ineffective campaigns and cut their duration, and continually measure results to tweak campaign effectiveness.
• Tie campaigns to revenue— With a wealth of data, marketers can more easily pinpoint how marketing campaigns contribute to increases in revenue for the company.
• Prove its own ROI— This technology helps save time and boost revenue, typically achieving positive ROI within the first year.
• Complete tedious data entry tasks— Marketers can then devote their energy to more creative and thought-intensive tasks. 

Give examples that will resonate with your teams. Reference their specific challenges and show where marketing automation can alleviate that burden. Show the teams which tasks will become automated — it’s likely tasks your team members find tedious. Place special emphasis on the wealth of customer data that can be analyzed (for marketing) and the potential for a large increase in lead quality (for sales). You can also highlight how marketing technology mastery adds another bullet point to their resumes. Ask your marketing automation provider for statistics and figures you can share with your team to make your case even stronger.

Set Expectations with a Clear Implementation Plan

Once you’ve got your staff excited about the benefits of marketing automation, it’s time to ease any fears they have about transitioning to this new, robust technology solution. Implementing a new technology takes time — perhaps one of the bigger sources of stress for employees is not knowing how much time it will take, or disruption it will cause to their day-to-day work. Without a plan and clear communication with your teams, you may face bottlenecks, misunderstandings, low user adoption, and decreased productivity.

Head off these risks by outlining key performance indicators (KPIs) for your implementation project and unveiling to all employees a roadmap of how the onboarding process will take place. Set timelines for specific milestones. Identify which team members will be involved at which steps during the process. Prepare your staff for how much time they’ll be expected to spend on the transition to the new system. When you can provide a clear understanding of what will be expected of them, you avoid taking anyone by surprise and causing undue resentment.

You should also identify a point person for the marketing automation platform who will become the internal expert and be available to answer employee questions. This reassurance may help dispel any remaining resistance among your teams.

Spur Their Sense of Competition

End your meeting by explaining that marketing automation enables your company to stay current with the digital age and keep an edge on your competition. This message will excite those who enjoy learning and growth. Even those who prefer the status quo will understand the critical nature of keeping up with competitors.

Salesforce’s “State of Marketing 2018” report reveals that 50% of high-performing companies currently use marketing automation; while only 21% of moderate performers use this technology and a mere 8% of underperformers have adopted it. Forrester Research predicts that spending on marketing automation will grow from $11.4 billion in 2017 to $25.1 billion annually. Few other sectors will grow by more than 200% in just six years.

Companies that don’t adopt this technology will quickly fall behind their technology-savvy competitors, and businesses are realizing this. Marketers, sales executives and even those in the C-suite are circling marketing automation tools. They’re intrigued and fascinated, but many are frightened, too. As a martech advocate, you can ease the fears and doubts of your sales and marketing staff by presenting a strong argument that’s tied to their individual pain points and backed by data. Once your teams embrace marketing automation, they’ll realize it’s not something to fight against but to run with; it can take your sales and marketing efforts to new heights.