“I was wowed the first time I saw how much information sales reps. can get on a lead” says Sophie Hedestad, CMO at Netigate.
Sophie Hedestad is Chief Marketing Officer at Netigate. A global SaaS company delivering insights from client and employee data.
I could see the leads journey from when they entered the database at the top of the funnel, to actually becoming a client. What I realized was that it requires a continuous effort. A B2B client needs several interactions before asking for a meeting, says Sophie Hedestad .
Marketing automation saves sales people from those who aren’t ready to buy.
An interaction is every time your potential client (lead) comes into contact with your brand. Long before buying anything from you. Businesses go online to find helpful information the same way consumers do, and modern customer relationships management (CRM) systems are set up to identify and track how many times a lead has engaged with your brand. In this process, leads go from cold to warm. Conventional wisdom says it requires around twelve touch points before a lead is considered warm or sales qualified. So, what’s the point? Sales representatives don’t have to reach out to people who haven’t already proved they’re interested.
It’s not enough to hold a good webinar. As a B2B-business you need relevant content and events, as well as social selling etc. Having this data, I could see it was important to work with more than one thing, Sophie explains.
Sophie's top Marketing Automation use cases
-What are the most important things businesses can do for themselves using this technology?
Some examples you can start off with, are typically those who let you skip a bunch of routine jobs that take a lot of time. Emails are only sent at the time they are most likely to be read. Offers on your own pages are only shown to those people it would be interesting for, and welcome emails or surveys to new clients can be sent at specific times after sign-up. Also, reports can be distributed internally on how many leads have come in this week, as well as remind sales reps to contact leads yet to be approached, Hedestad explains.
Stop wasting time on manual analysis
- Is there anything in particular you have stopped doing after using this marketing automation tool yourself?
I don’t spend countless hours on analysis anymore. Instead, with the aid of this tool I’ve been able to automate reports valuable to me. Sometimes I also need to provide reports for people internally, and I’ve been able to automate that reporting as well.
-What is the biggest myth of marketing automation?
Marketing automation is fantastic when it works, but if you do it half-baked and your data is not correct, you may as well do it manually. Do it properly, if you’re going to do it!
Learn from testing
-What is your favourite trick in digital marketing?
Don’t stop being curious. What didn’t fly six months ago, may suddenly work. Algorithms change and update all the time. It’s about being agile and having the courage to test. If you find yourself up a creek without a paddle, at least you learned something.
