Modern sales organization that recognize the value of the marketing tools they have at their disposal are much more effective in going after large markets and customers. To increase sales the solution isn’t necessary about adding more headcount to sales. It’s about building the proper infrastructure to make your existing reps more productive.
Here are several ways your sales department can be empowered by Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) integrated into your Salesforce CRM.
Prepare Better for Conversations
Understand the marketing digested by your prospects before calling them. Checking the Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) Prospect Activities in Salesforce for each lead or contact can tell you what web pages they visited, how they interacted with marketing emails and what content they downloaded. Knowing all these in advance will allow you to have a better conversation with your prospects.
Read the Prospect Activity Glossary for a full list of prospect activities recorded.
Send Template Emails Directly From Salesforce
How much time did you waste writing long emails? Even worst how many times did you copy and paste an email but forgot to customize it? All of these problems can be avoided by using Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) Email Templates via the Send Email button directly from Salesforce.
Sending one-to-one emails based on pre-defined templates will save you the time and effort. These can be follow up information, standard responses, links to specific content on your website or anything else that you would otherwise have to spend time typing out.
Help Your Customers Understand Your Products
When your prospects are looking at your pricing page is a very good indication they are seriously considering buying your products or services. By reaching out to help them with their research will make sure you are there for them at the right time. Use Page Actions to get notifications when someone is looking at the pricing page.
Immediately Follow Up On Meeting Requests
An immediate sales response to an online sales lead can make or break a sale, but very few companies do it. InsideSales.com conducted a Lead Response Management Study over five-years and found that minutes count in landing a sale. It said that “the odds of contacting a lead are 100 times greater when contacted within 5 minutes after the lead was submitted” than if the sales agent waits 30 minutes. Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) notifications to users and Salesforce task can be triggered when a prospects requests a meeting from your website. You will find this part of your Completion Actions steps. This will inform your sales department right away about prospects in immediate need of attention.
Focus On The Right Prospects Based on Their Grades
Do you know how your ideal customer looks like? Perform a buying persona exercise by looking at the characteristics of your most successful closed won opportunities. This will allow your sales team to focus on the right prospects.
Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) allows you to associate a Grade to your prospects based on demographic (also known as firmographic) fields such as Job Title, Number of Employees, Revenue or Industry. The grades range from F- to A+ depending how well someone matches your buying persona criteria. Focusing on the higher grades will ensure you are spending time effectively on the prospects that better fit your buying persona.
Read the Grading Overview in the Knowledge Book to learn more about Grading.
Focus on High Lead Score Prospects
You don’t want to waste time chasing prospects that are not interested in your company. Someone can have a good grade by matching your buying persona but that doesn’t mean they actually show interest in you.
Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) Lead Score allows you to identify behavior indicating buying signals. By clicking in emails, visiting your website or interacting with marketing content your prospects can build their lead score. Once they showed enough interest they can be ready to engage. Establish a lead score threshold for contacting prospects so you can focus only on those who show buying signals and are above your lead score thresholds.
Send Back to Marketing the Prospects That Are Not Ready to Buy Yet
For some prospects the timing might not be right. Some prospects might not have enough education about your complex products. There is no opportunity now but you might have a chance in the future. That is why you want to move them into a nurture stage in a sales process where your marketing department can nurture these prospects until they become ready to buy.
You can trigger a sequence of Drip Email Programs from Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) with useful content that will educate them about your products and services. This will also give them the opportunity to raise their hand when they do become ready to buy.
Send Marketing Approved Campaigns from Anywhere
Using Salesforce Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) Engage you can connect more effectively with your prospects from Salesforce CRM, Salesforce1 Mobile App or Gmail. You can launch and monitor marketing campaigns, add prospects to drip campaigns, follow up with prospects based on their behaviour and respond with the right content.
Talk to your marketing department to better help you use Salesforce Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) and practice these modern sales success habits. Marketing technologies are under-utilized in most companies, but they present a big opportunity to drive a competitive advantage if used properly. Your sales team will love them!
