Rising to the challenge are marketing automation solutions which can provide you with a central marketing database and information on how leads and prospects are interacting with your company. They also empower you to automate marketing processes, magically handling the busy work so that reps can spend more time interacting with prospects.
While many confuse marketing automation with email marketing, it goes a lot further, enabling you to track, orchestrate and optimize all campaigns whether they are on the phone, direct cell phone number list mail, email or via social media.
Because it’s cost effective and easy to use, we chose Act-On as our marketing automation solution. Also, it allows us to use some techniques essential for optimizing marketing initiatives, such as drip campaigns, segmentation, lead scoring and A/B testing. Finally, it integrates well with Salesforce.com.
Customer Relationship Management — Salesforce.com
You need a customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage customer data as well as your interactions with each client on the phone, live chat, social media or via your website. By having all the information about customers in one place, you can conduct relevant conversations, provide seamless service and drive sales growth.
For CRM, we like Salesforce. It provides excellent visibility into all contacts, enables you to streamline your sales process and thus close sales more rapidly. Because it’s cloud-based, business development reps (BDRs), field sales people and other sales personnel can all access the same information at the same time. Plus, you can customize the dashboard to run reports that help with opportunity management, sales forecasting and more.
Market Intelligence — InsideView
Market intelligence software provides information on markets, the companies within them and the people who work for them. It allows you to approach prospects armed with the insights you need to connect with the right people and have relevant conversations.
InsideView makes it easy to stay on top of what’s happening with prospects and customers. All you have to do is set up a Watchlist, and you’ll find out about their stock information, speaking engagements, news releases and more. Plus, it’s perfect for building lists of contacts within target companies.
And, of course, it integrates well with Salesforce.com.
