For marketing automation, the word “marketing” may be the star, but marketing automation has an equally large impact on sales, too. A common misconception surrounding automation is that it will only benefit the marketing team, while sales will be left with yet another system to learn how to use. This couldn’t be further from the truth — in fact, it only takes a few hours for sales reps to learn everything they need to know to get the most out of an automation system. And once they’re familiar with the tool, the benefits will start rolling in.

While marketing experiences benefits such as improved segmentation, more targeted messaging, and better revenue attribution, the benefits for your sales team will revolve around improved lead qualification, detailed tracking and activity alerts, and efficient lead nurturing. Sound like a mouthful? Let’s take a look.

1. Focus on the right leads

A lot of the qualms between marketing and sales are a result of poor lead quality. When marketing is passing along leads that aren’t qualified, or aren’t the right fit for your product or service, sales ends up wasting time on unnecessary follow-up. Fortunately, with the scoring and grading capabilities of marketing automation, leads are automatically qualified based on criteria you set. Marketing and sales can work together to define a qualified lead, then use a “score” to determine prospect interest and a “grade” to determine their fit.

2. See prospect activities in real time

How valuable would it be for your sales team to see a list of all of their prospect activities in one place? Probably pretty valuable, right? Now, what if they could see all of these prospect activities as they happen? With the real-time sales alerts provided by marketing automation, your sales reps will be able to see a log of their prospect activity right when it happens, giving them the ability to strike while the iron is hot. Having insight into these activities also tells your reps what their prospects are interested in, so that they can tailor their communications accordingly.

3. Prevent leads from slipping through the cracks

When leads aren’t ready to purchase yet, or are just getting started with their preliminary research, it’s easy to let them slip through the cracks. But even though they aren’t ready to work with a sales rep yet, ignoring these leads can increase the likelihood that they’ll be picked up by a competitor, which can result in lost revenue. Marketing automation prevents this by automatically nurturing leads through the sales process, i.e providing valuable content to prospects over time that will keep your company top of mind. And the best part for your sales team? There’s minimal time investment involved. In fact, your marketing team can build and control these nurturing campaigns in their entirety, if desired.

If you’d like to learn more about marketing automation’s impact on sales, check out our CSO Toolkit by clicking on the banner below.