Imagine running a business where one month your pipeline is full of potential customers excited to learn more about your product, but the next it’s completely empty.
Frustrating, right?
Believe it or not, this is the case for many businesses when we first are introduced to them, and it all has to do with the internal structure of their sales departments.
Grazing Limits Your Outreach
A lot of sales teams that are without a defined demand generation person also lack the processes to track their outbound communication. Their salespeople are “grazers,” meaning they are good at managing existing accounts, handling inbound leads that come to them, and finding potential opportunities at trade shows.
They are not, however, typically good at outbound prospecting.
These mature B2B companies end up having to rely on their account executives to act as full cycle sales reps to prospect AND close their own business. When that becomes the case, the
salesperson will always fall back on working with their existing book of business before prospecting for new business.
This results in sales reps doing minimal outreach and a lack of follow-up with people they meet at trade shows or events. Which, in turn, brings up pipeline issues, because one month your rep is busy prospecting and the next month they’re too busy trying to close those deals to worry about keeping the pipeline full.
But don’t worry, this scenario is nothing smart marketing automation software can’t fix.
The Importance of Knowing (and Increasing) Your Number of Touches
When you have a grazing sales team, are without a defined generation person, and lack the processes to track your outbound communication, it’s difficult to increase your touches and keep your sales people accountable.
Effective Marketing Automation (MA) software paired with a reliable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software removes these roadblocks, helping your sales team improve outbound prospecting and closing deals.
MA software dramatically increases your number of touches while the CRM can help keep track of potential and current clients. They work hand in hand to push useful information to your sales team so they can follow up (and eventually close deals) with warm/hot leads. Plus you get to spend less time fussing over prospecting.
Knowing the number of touches your sales reps make is beneficial for a few reasons.
- It can show if your sales team isn’t doing enough outreach as a result of their grazing sales practices, which in itself is a problem.
- If a sales rep is saying they weren’t able to get the number of touches they wanted and the sales manager notices in the CRM that they only made ten calls all month, of course they aren’t going to hit their quota.
It is also important to keep track of your touches during an outreach campaign to better understand your prospects. Knowing how many touches that were needed for a particular prospect provides insight as to what similar potential customers will respond to best and what the right email cadence is for them.
How Marketing Automation Can Increase Your Number of Touches
MA gives businesses the ability to automate emails and other website actions which provides actionable insight as to whether or not someone may be interested in a product or service.
Most businesses don’t reach out and nurture their relationships with past customers and neither does their competition. MA gives proactive companies like our clients a competitive advantage simply because it keeps them on task–even when they’re too busy for active outreach.
MA software can organize large amounts of accumulated data from your own domain and convert it to lists of potential customers. The automated email outreach system then reaches out to the vast range of contacts in a strategic series of emails, exponentially increasing touches.
This lets your sales team focus on closing deals because the MA software is doing all the pipeline work for them.
Happy prospecting!
