How to use email marketing automation tools to enhance software company sales?

SaaS company sales are divided into "internal sales" and "external sales". The former specifically refers to sales personnel who can complete most of their work in the office, and they often contact customers through email, phone, etc. So, what is the correct approach to inside sales for a SaaS company? This article provides you with textbook content. This article comes from the Drip startup team.

Your SaaS application just sits there and it won't sell itself. Rushing to set a price or hastily launching a free trial won’t help you reach your sales goals.

You may see new users coming in, but that doesn’t mean they’ll actually stay and ultimately drive your company forward. From the initial user growth to large-scale development, you need a shiny and well-maintained machine to make money for you. Most SaaS entrepreneurs understand this, and it's nothing new.

However, many people are unable to establish the correct process in sales. Let’s get this all sorted out again!

First, there is so much information out there about how to sell SaaS that it’s easy to get lost in it all. Here, the first step to strengthening your sales force, and thereby acquiring more paying subscribers, is to have the right tools at hand.

Specifically, you need an email marketing automation tool that can track, cultivate, refine, personalize, and rate potential users. Don’t get me wrong, of course tools can’t solve all your problems. A tool is not an end, but a path to an end.

If your sales process is already terrible, a marketing automation tool can make it worse.

All in all, it is an "amplifier" rather than a "magic wand".

But in order for your sales reps to better engage with prospects and send them the right message, at the right time, to the right person, they should take advantage of this tool. Next, we’ll look at how automated marketing can help your sales team.

But first, some definitions:

Potential users are potential users? Is this really the case? No, there is a more subtle distinction.

Your marketing process should be about generating leads, which for a SaaS company is either about getting contact information to nurture customers later (mostly by getting them to sign up and get their email address), and/or offering a free trial policy.

Now comes the key part, and it is also where you must understand the concept:

What we are talking about now is how your marketing activities can bring in "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs), who can be transferred to your sales team and further become "Sales Qualified Leads" (SQLs).

How you define and differentiate between MQL and SQL depends entirely on the sales process and SaaS application you design. Generally speaking, the current standard is that SQL is a potential customer that is "ready to buy". In other words, they are now ready to consult someone about "buying", or the actions they have taken already include very obvious purchasing intentions.

For a SaaS App, a free trial user has now started to try it out and is highly engaged in the process of trying the App, showing various behavioral actions. Then this person is a standard "SQL". And now this person has only registered as a user for a 30-day free trial, and there has been no further action since then? This person is still an "MQL" and they need more time to develop.

If this person signs up for a 30-day free trial, tries your app every day or every week (it depends on the purpose of your app), constantly tries new features and integrations, and your data analysis tools also show that their usage is very high, then this person is a SQL, and their next action is likely to be to pay for it, or they will be easily "pushed" into it.

• This "push" action may be a combination of several behaviors coming from you.
• It could be the right message at the right time;
• It could be a webinar that just happened to come up;
• It could be an email directly from your sales representative;
• It could be a meeting held offline; your goal is to get your internal sales team doing the right thing at the right time with the right prospect .

To achieve this goal, you can use email marketing automation solutions.

"Marketing and sales blended into one" is the future!

The process from MQL to SQL and then to a real paying customer should be as smooth as silk. You should not regard "marketing" and "sales" as two independent links, but rather as two aspects of attracting, cultivating, and converting customers.

These two aspects act simultaneously throughout the entire sales process.

Specifically, it is very important to get the sales team involved in the initial stage of generating potential customers. Because their expertise can add more persuasiveness to marketing and bring in high-quality potential customers. Such an initiative must be a joint effort, with sales and marketing personnel working together to achieve it. They have to fight together, no team can be effective on its own.

“Sales Enablement” means that marketing activities can use the marketing automation tools at hand to help sales teams improve their performance. This process combines the two major functions of "marketing" and "sales". These two teams need very clear communication. If the marketers don’t know what the salespeople want, it will be difficult for them to design and execute a useful marketing platform.

Where do you start? Of course, start with your target buyers!

If you have been working in the field of email marketing for a long time, you undoubtedly know how important it is to segment your user base. They can be grouped into various categories, such as the following:

1. area
2. industry
3. product
4. Sales Team

But you should take your email marketing strategy one step further and send content to visitors who come to your website and to those who download your white paper.

Again, using marketing automation can make this step easier. There are many articles that can be written about marketing automation. In this article, to illustrate the key points more succinctly, we can look at 11 ways "email marketing automation" can improve the capabilities of your internal sales team. As shown below:

1. Improve your sales visibility in your CRM area

If you don’t add your leads to contact profiles, or individual cards (depending on what CRM software you use), then the work of “following up with leads” is effectively not being done. Ideally, this is often done at the stage of "transitioning from a potential consultant to an MQL" or "transitioning from an MQL to an SQL".

However, if this work is done manually, it will be inefficient, time-consuming, and sometimes even impossible to complete. Marketing automation tools can help you do all this. They will handle it all for you automatically.

In addition to using "labels" or "grouping", most of this software can also be used to "customize customer differentiation". You can divide marketing (sales) objects into different areas according to the following ideas:

The status of the prospect: The salesperson will know where the person is in the sales process.

Potential user rating: Salespeople can learn about the importance of this person, that is, the profit contribution rating;

You can also segment potential users based on the following behaviors:

1. Filled out the form;
2. Sent an email;
3. The email was opened;
4. Sent by sales emails;
5. Opening links in sales emails;
6. Sent the email;
7. Excluded from the sales process

Although all the above criteria are worth a try, we will only select the most important ones that best meet your needs to segment potential customers.

2. Always invest resources in customers who are most likely to buy

Don't spend a lot of time and manpower before the other party finally reluctantly agrees to buy, or just walks away in the end. For the potential customers who are now in your field of vision, you should always track and monitor their behaviors. By observing what they are doing, you can decide which ones among them will become the best potential customers. The so-called best ones are those customers who can achieve performance growth with the lowest sales cost.

How to do all this? You “rate” your potential customers.

Assign different scores to actions that lead to a purchase, and your automation software can track them. Don’t think that all this is difficult. A large number of complex calculation processes are performed within the software, and it ultimately has only one goal: when a user who intends to purchase your product or service performs a certain "specific behavior", the software will remind you immediately.

3. Accelerate the sales process

When the marketing process is fully automated, you can quickly track every move of potential users, which greatly shortens your sales cycle. Moreover, automation can make the sales process flexible. If your potential users are not ready to buy yet, you can add them to a "to be nurtured" group. Industry experts have conducted research on this practice and found that compared with businesses that do not have "to be nurtured" behavior, those that effectively cultivate and guide potential users in the subsequent period will see a 20% increase in performance.

4. Calculating ROI (Return on Investment) is very easy

You need to evaluate how your marketing campaign is going! You can't just throw money into the water without knowing what the final result will be. At this time, you need a very accurate and detailed report, which will show how much money you spent to acquire each potential user, and finally link it to the final transaction. In order to acquire each trading user, how much money the initial promotional funds were allocated to each person.

5. Accurate tracking, analysis and reporting

In order to send the right emails to the right potential users and do the promotion work at each appropriate "conversion node" in the sales cycle, you need to continuously monitor and track user behavior. If this were done manually, it would be too difficult to do, a huge time investment, and easily lead to burnout.

6. Flood your sales pipeline with high-quality leads

Marketing automation can fill your sales pipeline with high-quality leads. The right software can help you design custom landing pages with forms that are flexible and interactive with potential customers. To do this you need to rely on some testing tools, and there are many options on the market that can be easily applied.

In addition, marketing software can be configured in a variety of ways, such as integration with Google Adwords and other PPC platforms. Automation can provide real-time reports, allowing you to see how your current potential user acquisition work is progressing. You can adjust some strategies and methods from time to time to achieve the goal of using your marketing budget with the highest efficiency.

7. Send personalized and customized emails

Automation tools allow you to tailor emails to different groups of potential customers. These emails with different focuses are the most effective way for you to establish a connection with your market, and they are also likely to generate brand loyalty for those users who have already purchased your products and services from you.

The software allows you to plan emails in advance and keep in touch with your customers continuously. No matter what stage your potential customers are in the sales cycle, it can send corresponding emails.

With this automated software, you can monitor, review, modify, and send emails in a pre-designed sequence and at certain times.

8. Follow from beginning to end

Automated marketing software follows users everywhere, no matter where they are in the sales cycle. In the process, you can get a lot of detailed and useful information, which can help you further convert them into paying customers.

9. Get better at developing cold leads

A potential user (cold lead) may also be cold, perhaps because he is not having a good day, or the timing of receiving marketing information is not very appropriate. Marketing automation software can accurately identify these users and then take a series of measures to develop them in the future. The sales team can then focus on potential customers who are more likely to convert further.

10. Sales reps can share emails

This has two main advantages:

1. Track these emails to provide you with more data based on your promotional marketing.
2. Everyone can access these emails, so all team members are always consistent in their understanding of the work progress and know what specific work is coming next.

11. Combine call tracking

Marketing automation can now be combined with call tracking as well. There is now evidence that call tracking data, when integrated with data produced by marketing automation, can greatly enhance the sales capabilities of internal sales teams. Aberdeen's report "2014 State of Electronic Marketing Automation Report" shows that more than 70% of the best companies in the industry combine telephone and marketing automation data.

12. Of course, most importantly, email marketing automation can help you increase your sales team’s closing rate.

Obviously, a tool is just a tool and it cannot be a life-saving straw. Email marketing automation itself cannot help you sell more, but it breaks down the barriers between marketing and sales, making every aspect of sales work detailed, specific, and controllable.