Marketing Automation and Business Intelligence

We love Google Analytics because we can see how many people visit our site or our clients’ sites and where they come from. But when we coupled that with Marketing Automation (MA), it was like turning on a light in a dark room. The business intelligence MA generates is incredible. Business intelligence (BI) is defined as the set of techniques and tools used to transform raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. We have found that using MA (we partner with SharpSpring) in our day-to-day interactions with current and prospective clients has created an enormous amount of business intelligence. For the sake of this discussion, when we refer to BI, we will be talking about website activity and sales efforts.

BI is critical to ANY organization. At Rule29, our current clients’ needs come first. We also want to attract new clients, which requires an intentional sales effort. That means prospecting, qualifying, calling, following up, presenting, estimating, landing an account, and maintaining it. Referrals are great, and we get a lot of them, but there’s nothing like good old-fashioned sales calls – by phone, email, direct mail, or personal visit – and you have to track ALL of that activity.

Calling on unqualified leads is neither effective nor profitable. Many small to medium-sized businesses simply don’t have the time or know-how to provide qualified leads to their sales team. This is where Marketing Automation (MA) tools can help by creating the intelligence to separate qualified leads from the scrap heap, making the sales team much more efficient and happy. (Ever been around a sales person in the middle of a sales drought? Not fun.)

Let’s say we have 1,000 new leads. SharpSpring, the MA tool we use, has a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) built into its program that allows us to create profiles and personas for each of our leads. All we need is their name, their organization, and their email address. The more information we can add to their profile, like phone numbers, an address, etc., the better.

Marketing automation has the ability to track every move a lead makes when it comes to interacting with your company. Web visits, email threads, forms submitted, calls made, links clicked–all of these interactions are logged into what we call the “Life of the Lead” and SCORED. This is where it gets good. MA creates Business Intelligence by assigning a score to each interaction–for completeness of profile, for every action taken both on the web and through email, and for the type of lead.

All of this is continuously done behind the scenes. At any one time, we can see a snapshot of our lead list and see who has the highest scores. These are our qualified leads. We also give these leads a decay rate – we subtract points for inactivity, creating an even larger gap between qualified leads and those that are not qualified. We can see in real time when our clients have visited our site, what pages they have browsed, and how long they stayed. Every morning, we get a summary of the previous day’s activity. We can also assign our sales team as owners of different leads, notifying them via text or email if one of those leads reaches a milestone.

There are many reasons to incorporate Marketing Automation into your sales and marketing strategy. The ability to create Business Intelligence and automatically qualify leads is reason enough!

For more information on how Rule29 can help you set up a Marketing Automation program powered by SharpSpring, give us a call, or fill out the contact form here (which is connected to SharpSpring – so don’t be surprised if you get an email from us thanking you for your time!)