Variations in industries and brands in B2B and B2C landscapes can pose numerous sales and marketing challenges.
Tailoring buyer journeys across B2C and B2B landscapes, for instance, is a challenge. As a consequence, difficulties abound when organizations try to meet the needs of different prospects, and the distinct use cases in sales and marketing teams.
Let’s go over several sales and marketing challenges that automation will help overcome in 2020.
#1: Lack of Visibility into a Lead’s Activities
In sales and marketing, not knowing how prospects interact with different mediums wastes time and opportunities. This contributes to inefficiencies experienced in sales and marketing.
According to research, corporations that leverage their clients’ behavioral insights outperformed their peers by more than 25 percent in gross margin, and 85 percent in sales growth.
Automation, however, is an effective solution. With automation, sales and marketing teams can analyze customer data to create personalized outreach campaigns.
Specifically, creating rich client profiles and carefully tracking response rates empowers sales and marketing teams’ decision making on what types of content are effective.
With automation, sales and marketing teams can determine over what medium or in what format their content is likely to have the greatest impact on targeted client segments.
These insights enable sales and marketing teams to have a clear understanding of outcomes they’re looking to reach.
#2: Nurturing Customer Relationships After-Sales
Often, sales and marketing teams bury themselves in workload and are overly focused on the next quarter’s targets. So, nurturing customer relationships after-sales becomes a challenge: clients shouldn’t have to deal with sudden silence after they’ve purchased a product. Worse, client support majorly deals with product-related issues.
According to customer loyalty statistics, existing clients are more valuable than prospects. In fact, the probability of selling to a new client is between 5 and 20%. In contrast, the probability of selling to existing clients in between 60 and 70%.
This implies that sales and marketing teams should nurture customer relationships after-sales. This can lead to more business.
That said, automation can simplify sales and marketing teams’ ability to track and communicate with current clients. Through specially personalized content, sales and marketing teams can enhance client loyalty.
With automation, marketing teams can easily create campaigns targeting current clients and share nurturing processes with sales departments. This will equip sales reps with tools needed to maintain relationships post-sales, and upsell existing clients.
#3: Lack of Sales Forecasting Accuracy
According to the 2019 Sales Compensation best practices study, roughly 75% of surveyed organizations relied upon spreadsheets to manage their sales and forecasting.
This manual approach introduces several challenges. Top among them is inaccurate data that affects the accurate payment of sales reps, and misaligned sales planning and forecasting.
Automation of sales forecasting allows the effective use of data in sales and forecasting. Specifically, automation enables storing and sourcing data from a centralized database. As a consequence, it improves the calculation of sales commissions and sales forecasting.