How Marketing Automation Integrates the Sales Pipeline and Customer Journey

Customer relationships are at the heart of your business. Your goal should be to offer the most engaging customer experience from initial contact through to the delivery of the goods or services. But there's a problem. 

B2B sales interactions are increasingly digital, and this provides companies with a wealth of customer intelligence that should be the foundation of any sales and marketing strategy. However, in our multichannel world, your customer’s journey is also more complex than ever before. B2B buyers go through a series of stages to complete a purchase, looping back to revisit steps they’ve already completed or skipping ones that aren’t relevant. This creates a confusing web of interactions with your brand that can be difficult to untangle.

Against this backdrop, we try to manage the sales process using a nice, orderly, linear sales pipeline to track opportunities. This creates a fundamental disconnect between buyer’s behaviour and your internal sales management. 

If your sales pipeline doesn’t reflect the reality of the customer journey, is it possible your analytics and sales forecasts are incorrect? How can you tell if a lead is truly progressing? And, if it is challenging to identify stalled opportunities, how can you seek to intervene meaningfully and help move prospects forward through the rest of the pipeline?

While the digital b2b customer experience certainly presents its challenges, finding the right approach that balances the needs of both the buyer and your company presents opportunities.

An end to end sales and marketing automation platform with integrated CRM provides the solution. It helps businesses to tie the customer journey and sales pipeline together, allowing them to track and manage opportunities more effectively, all the while making the customer experience more relevant.

Why Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation tools represent an investment in your customer relationships. It helps you to get to know your customer and enhances and aligns your sales and marketing efforts.

79% of B2B marketers say that the best way to engage buyers is to deliver personally relevant communications and experiences. Personalising your interactions increases the likelihood of a high-quality deal by 12%, however this is contingent on executing well. 

Automation enables you to engage with, gain intelligence about and manage leads more effectively at scale providing that all important personalised customer experience and a more efficient and informed sales process.  

Create and Track Milestones in the Buyers’ Journey

Using an automation platform to track key moments in the customer journey, you can monitor your leads’ behaviour and engagement and take action exactly when leads need it.

By creating a customer journey map with the verifiable events - such as attending a webinar, visiting a sales page or booking a demo - you can understand which stage of the journey each prospect is in, what they need to progress and what your team needs to do to help them.

Some steps the buyer takes are more indicative of purchase readiness than others. The system uses each interaction for lead scoring, applying different weights to each of the moments in the buyers’ journey. From there, you can use lead scoring to enhance your marketing and sales strategies depending on a contact’s status as a marketing qualified lead (MQLs) or sales qualified leads (SQLs) and the journey your prospects have been on.

Interactions can also trigger workflows. These benefit the customer, but also both sales and marketing. Workflows allow you to link that understanding of the customer journey and apply it to the sales pipeline, optimising both the customer experience and sales management.

Branching logic allows you to take appropriate action, both internally and externally, based on an individual leads’ interactions with your company. For example, if a lead registers for a webinar but doesn’t attend, their lead score will show they’re warm but still hedging their bets. 

The system can trigger an email message inviting them to view on demand, with automated workflows delivering further targeted marketing communications dependent on the action that prompts. This allows you to provide them with the information they need, educating them about your products and service and allowing your team to learn more about their requirements as they continue their research. Workflows can also assign tags, helping to create a broader picture of your contact and allowing for more detailed segmentation.

However, a lead that watches that webinar live all the way to the end and then clicks through to the ‘book a demo’ page on your website is red hot and probably deserves more one-to-one attention.

Internally, the ‘book a demo’ click through event can trigger a workflow to move the opportunity automatically across sales pipeline stages. This way, your system always reflects the current status of every opportunity in your pipeline, enabling accurate insights and a way of quantifying pipeline value. Without this information, your sales team cannot focus their efforts on the leads with the most potential to contribute to your company’s bottom line.

The contact progressing to a new stage of the pipeline can then trigger notifications, prompting your team to take action. It could automatically assign them to a sales rep for immediate follow up, or included in a daily report on hot leads that is emailed out to the team in time for their daily meeting.

You can also sync team communications so the entire team can monitor the conversation with a lead. This allows you to improve response times and proactive outreach, allowing another rep to jump in and follow up seamlessly, minimising wait times and delays on the customer's end. 

In the later stages of the customer journey, this can be crucial to closing the deal but you can enable notifications on many critical moments, such as when a visitor submits an initial contact form or visits a certain page. Automation makes sure sales can act at exactly the right moment to maximise conversions.

In an integrated automation platform, all of this information also syncs instantly to the CRM so you can see the full history of your prospect’s interactions. This provides an overview of the life of the lead that can help sales to qualify and prioritise leads, diagnose each contact’s requirements and provide solutions.

If your team is reaching out via phone, integrated call monitoring can help you keep track of all call details. Reps can easily log the date/time of the call, as well as the duration and any details discussed. This helps with the follow up later on, so you know exactly what information and communications the lead has received. 

You can even use automation to maintain a relationship with a contact you’ve been cultivating when they move jobs. If your contact transitions into a new role, the update on their LinkedIn profile can trigger a notification to your team to follow up and update the CRM. Once completed, an automated email goes out congratulating them and encouraging them to get in touch if they need anything, nurturing the relationship for the future. 

The system also understands natural lead decay over time, flagging stalled opportunities to include in re-engagement campaigns or simply allowing you to clean up your pipeline and focus your attention on fresh leads.

Diagnose Issues in the Customer Journey

Another exciting opportunity of using marketing automation software to link the customer journey and sales pipeline is the ability to diagnose where opportunities stall and fall.

This can lead to insights that help you get a better understanding of what customer touchpoints are working and which aren't across your customer journey. This can then form the foundations for enhancing your marketing initiatives, improving marketing’s ability to qualify leads before handing them off to sales.

For example, if most leads are only spending a few minutes on your product guide page without downloading supplementary information or booking a demo, you can concentrate on optimising conversion on that web page. Your copy might need to be revised, perhaps to include a stronger call to action, or dynamic content could make a generic page feel more relevant to each individual. You might also target follow up email campaigns for your marketing team's attention, as well as retargeting ads to allow you to continue educating those visitors.

1827 Marketing can show you how sales pipeline automation and customer journey integration can come together to set our business up for long-lasting success. Contact us today for a demo.