I recently wrote an article about sales and marketing’s joint responsibility to foster customer engagement—but this isn’t the only thing the two teams should be tackling together.

Let’s talk personalization.

When it comes to our buyers, it’s becoming apparent that generic, untargeted messages aren’t going to cut it. Buyers expect a new, more one-to-one selling experience, where their needs are always at the center. While this requires more effort on the part of today’s businesses, it ultimately benefits both parties: according to eConsultancy, businesses that are personalizing the web experience for their buyers are seeing an increase in sales of 19%, on average.

Much like customer engagement, the responsibility to personalize the selling experience for our buyers doesn’t fall entirely on marketing’s shoulders. While your marketing team can take the lead by using marketing automation to target email communications and personalize the web experience, it’s up to sales to tailor the actual sales pitch to each individual buyer.  Let’s take a look at two ways sales reps can make this happen—in the most effective way possible:

1. Reach out at the right time with real-time alerts.

According to Neolane and DMA, 60% of respondents note that they struggle to personalize content in real-time, yet 77% believe real-time personalization is crucial. Many marketing automation tools provide the insight needed to make this real-time personalization happen, through detailed prospect tracking notifications. By customizing these real-time notifications to display the actions that are deemed most important, sales reps can be notified the moment that one of their prospects downloads a piece of content, views the pricing page, submits a form, and more.

These notifications signal to sales reps that appropriate action is needed, and arm them with the information they need to reach out to individual prospects with a personalized sales message. For example, if a sales rep sees that one of their prospects downloaded a white paper on social media, they can reach out with additional information on a related topic.  

2. Do away with cold calls.

Many B2B organizations have members of their sales teams who are strictly devoted to cold calling. This is a difficult job to begin with, but becomes even more complicated when reps are left guessing at their leads’ activities and motivations. Marketing automation uses link tracking in emails to simplify the cold-calling process by telling reps when leads are clicking on links in their emails, which links they’re clicking on, and which content they’re interested in.

This gives sales reps the intel they need to take the conversation from “Hey, I just wanted to touch base again on Product A” to “I saw you were interested in some of our content on email marketing. Did you have any questions, or want to talk further about email or deliverability?”

Looking for more ways that you can personalize the selling process for your buyers? Take a look at Pardot’s newly released white paper, Personalization with Automation: The Complete Guide.