Getting Started with Marketing Automation for Sales & Lead Generation

No matter what marketing planning model your company uses, reaching certain results within a specific timeframe is definitely among the objectives. The problem is that sometimes it’s impossible to achieve the desired results in the desired timeframe without hiring additional employees. Increasing the pace is often important for keeping up or staying ahead of the competition. In such situations, one of the best solutions is to automate part of the repetitive business processes, including sales & lead generation. Automation is a hot topic these days for companies of all sizes, but choosing one of the many tools available can be challenging.

In a particular case, lead gen automation tools should mainly focus on achieving two goals, building a reliable database of prospects and sending email messages in bulk. Let’s take a look at the key performance indicators that would be relevant, and some of the features that make a sales & lead gen automation tool good.

KPIs to Monitor When Using a Sales & Lead Gen Automation Tool

When it comes to what key performance indicators should be monitored when using an automation tool, there are two separate perspectives. First of all, you might want to know whether the database built with them is indeed relevant. In that respect, the KPIs to monitor are:

• Database accuracy
• Number of newly-added contacts in a period of time
• Amount of erroneous data
• Contacts compatibility with the buyer persona profile

Secondly, if the tool also focuses on automating email campaigns, the KPIs to keep in mind include:

• Number of sent emails
• Open rate
• Email sending error rate
• Click rate
• Number of completed goals (e.g. filling up a form, positive replies, etc.)

With that in mind, let’s take a look at a couple of the features that lead gen automation tools should have to help your company achieves its objectives.

What Features Should SaaS Startups Look for?

Sales and lead gen automation tools are the way to go for SaaS companies in English-speaking markets, especially for automating online sales. Given the small budgets that such organizations handle at the beginning of their road, investing in a complex and expensive solution makes no sense at all, as the ROI would most likely not be positive.

While email marketing automation is included in most automation tools, things are a bit different when it comes to prospecting. Some tools provide access to an already-built database featuring hundreds of millions of high-quality contacts that you can filter depending on your specific demographic details. Others include research tools that can crawl the web and analyze potential customers who match your buyer persona profiles.

CRM synchronization, automated deduplication, retargeting campaign automation, support for live chat and webinar marketing features are also something you might be interested in. The main idea, when looking for the best way to generate high-quality leads is to see if your budget is enough for the tool that has all the features you need. Otherwise, you might have to look into other options.

Sales & Lead Gen Automation Tools to Consider

With these features and KPIs in mind, it’s time to look into some of the options that you have in terms of sales & lead generation tools. While this is only a brief description, we’ll mention the pros and cons of each tool, as follows:

• RightHello leverages email and social media to find relevant business people and to outreach potential clients, all while bringing valuable conversations to your inbox. The database of this tool includes more than 4.7 million businesses with details such as their market, technology, websites and size. In terms of email marketing, the tool enables you to contact up to 300 decision makers in each companies using up to 7 follow-ups. It cannot be integrated with other platforms, but a dedicated consultant will analyze the results regularly.
• Growbots comes with a database of over 200 million prospects and a below 10% bounce rate. In this case, the criteria include the industry, company size, location, job position, technologies and web traffic. Growbots can use email providers such as Google or Yahoo to send automatic emails with unlimited follow-ups, time zone detection, personalized emails with custom fields. There’s no integration here, either, but the tool offers automation features such as out-of-office rescheduling, A/B testing and advanced reports. Best of all, Growbots syncs with your CRM in real-time.
• bant.io helps you create buyer persona profiles based on a mix of channels that include phone, email, social media profiles and search engines. bant.io can send personalized emails and follow-ups, and comes with reply detection that stops the sequence when getting a genuine reply to one of the emails.A/B testing and retargeting capabilities are among the major benefits of this tool.
• Getresponse doesn’t come with a database, but you can paste your list into it, or import it from Google Docs, Google Contacts, Salesforce, Zendesk, Magento, Formstack and more. For email marketing, this tool provides accurate segmentation, autoresponders, high-converting web forms and email statistics. Getresponse does well in the automation department, as well, as it can help you build fully scalable workflows using a drag-and-drop interface. On top of that, it tracks subscriber behavior in real time to send reactions to completed purchases or abandoned carts.
• BuzzBuilder doesn’t come with a database, either, but it allows you to import your own. It helps create personalized emails and can be integrated with Salesforce, which is a major plus. Campaign and landing page performance reports can be generated automatically. Website visitor tracking is a feature that could differentiate this tool from the others.
• Prospect is available as a Chrome extension that relies on filters such as the title of leads, industry, location, or specific keywords. The scheduled, personalized follow-ups sent using this tool are stopped whenever a prospect replies, clicks or converts. As for integration, Prospect works with Pipedrive, Close.io, Salesforce and Pipedrive. In terms of automation, the tool tracks email open rate, link clicks, replies and conversions, all using a pixel tracker.
• LeadFuze is a Chrome extension that enables you to look up leads using their title, industry, location or even specific keywords. This tool can bring 200 million B2B professionals closer to you through a series of automated personalized outreach messages. LeadFuze integrates with HubSpot, Close.io, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zapier and more, is used by Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe, among others, and can generate real-time reports of click-throughs and responses.

The choice you make should be correlated with your specific needs and with your company’s budget. Some of these tools come with expensive monthly subscriptions, so making estimations in terms of ROI is highly recommended.

Is Investing in a New Automation Tool Worth It?

More often than not, startups that have a simple and customized sales process don’t afford to spend a lot on very expensive and very complex sales and lead gen automation platforms. In addition, from a business development point of view, they cannot afford to invest in solutions that have time-consuming learning curves.

If your company manages a great number of customers, instead, there’s a need for very complex tools such as HubSpot or Marketo. In turn, these can prove very difficult to integrate and manage. Having employees trained takes a lot of time and even more resources, which in turn can set you behind the competition.

An even better option is to outsource the lead gen automation activities to a business partner who already has the know-how for the best solutions out there. This way, the lead gen process can be customized to match your company’s needs exactly. Get in touch with us if you would like to find out more about this approach!