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How do you keep the sales funnel fed? It’s an ongoing challenge for B2B marketers. There are prospects to identify, content to create, leads to generate and nurture, and sales goals to meet. All these tasks are necessary to develop a successful buyer’s journey, but they can be time-consuming, especially if they’re executed manually.
When B2B marketers rely on manual processes, it can result in fewer qualified leads, less visibility, greater inefficiency and errors, poor data integration between marketing and sales, inconsistent messaging and impersonal messaging, and the inability to scale.
Scale Up Personalization, Dial Back Wasted Time with Marketing Automation
It’s why so many businesses are turning to marketing automation for B2B. With marketing automation, businesses can rely on software to do the heavy lifting, automatically performing tasks, such as identifying leads, generating content, or conducting analytics, based on user-defined triggers. In a 2023 survey of marketers, 79% said their businesses used marketing automation, with 35% reporting their marketing was mostly or fully automated.
The benefits of marketing automation for B2B can span across the buyer’s journey, enabling marketers to:
- Produce personalized content at scale tailoring experiences using real-time data
- Generate stronger leads through automated scoring
- Nurture leads with greater effectiveness with tailored messaging and cadence
- Keep marketing and sales teams in sync for more efficient lead management and increased ROI
- Provide deeper campaign insights to optimize results
- Save time and decrease costs at every step, from attracting prospects to analytics and reporting
How a business wants to employ marketing automation for B2B depends on their unique needs, including the size of their business, prospect base, sales goals, and marketing budget. Some businesses may wish to fully automate every step of their buyer’s journey, while others may wish to focus on a couple of key junctures.
When stakeholders consider investing in marketing automation for B2B, it’s helpful to see how other businesses have put it into practice. The three Salesforce case studies below illustrate how and where marketing automation for B2B can help a company reach its sales and marketing goals.
Enhancing Prospect Engagement at RTI International
Founded in 1958, RTI International is a nonprofit research institute that delivers data to clients that include local, regional, and national governments. In 2020, RTI was a provider for TIA (Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment), a state program that gave school districts extra funding to incentivize teachers to work in high-need schools and hard-to-fill positions.
To increase awareness about TIA, RTI created a series of monthly informational webinars specifically for Texas school administrators. To drive webinar attendance, RTI used Marketing Cloud Engagement, the B2B marketing automation platform that’s built on Salesforce.
With the help of marketing automation, RTI sent out two emails a month, inviting educators to their webinar. The first email went out one week before the webinar and was sent to RTI’s entire contact list. Three days prior to the webinar, RTI sent out a second email to only nonrespondents from the first email. RTI tracked open rates and assigned engagement scores based on who registered and who then attended a webinar. RTI’s business development team received contact lists for additional follow up, and they were notified when a contact’s engagement score reached a designated threshold—ensuring that no leads were left behind.
Marketing Cloud Engagement helped RTI improve lead generation through:
- Email automation
- Engagement scoring
- Lead nurturing
Increasing Conversion Rates at Grammarly
For anyone who wants to polish their writing, whether it’s a short email or a long research paper, Grammarly is ready to help. Beyond its individual users, the AI-powered writing assistant is trusted by 70,000 professional teams and at 96% of the Fortune 500. Yet, when it came to building its prospect email lists, Grammarly relied on manual effort that took its marketing team hours to complete. Even then, the lists often contained spam bots or accounts not ready to convert.
To identify strong leads with greater speed and accuracy, Grammarly used Account Engagement from Salesforce. Now, Grammarly could see where multiple users worked at the same company to predict the potential need for a business account. From there, Einstein Account Insights could score those leads based on how many users were at a company and how much they engaged with Grammarly. The leading prospects were then automatically routed to the appropriate salesperson.
Thanks to marketing automation for B2B, Grammarly’s marketing team could now send about 200 high-quality leads a month, which led to a 30% in MQL conversion. What’s more, what used to take 60 to 90 days to convert and close, now took just 30 days.
Account Engagement helped Grammarly increase MQL conversions through:
- Lead identification
- Lead scoring
- Automatically routing leads
Scaling Up Prospecting at Ennube Solutions
Offering services in design, implementation, and support, Ennube Solutions helps companies—from enterprises to startups—make the most of their Salesforce products. Ennube has offices in Ecuador and Berkeley, California, and sells into the U.S. However, for the Ecuador-based sales team, English is a second language. For the small company, this meant the CEO needed to take time away from managing the business to proofread prospecting emails.
To eliminate this bottleneck, Ennube turned to Einstein 1 Sales to create emails using relevant customer and company data to generate content in approved email templates. Einstein also helps with prospecting, identifying accounts that are likely to convert based on Ennube’s definition of an ideal customer. In addition, Einstein has enabled Ennube to generate marketing blogs and imagery much more quickly for a more robust inbound strategy.
Altogether, marketing automation for B2B has increased Ennube’s marketing efforts exponentially. Since its implementation, Ennube has seen a 50% increase in sales productivity, 7.5X more prospects contacted YOY, and a 5,600% increase in delivered emails YOY.
Einstein 1 Sales enabled Ennube Solutions to scale up prospecting through:
- Email automation
- Lead identification
- Content generation
A Simple Strategy for Reaching the Right Prospects in Less Time
From automatically sending along qualified leads to sales to producing an end-to-end content campaign—complete with a campaign brief—marketing automation for B2B has the power to transform a business’s marketing operations, and its bottom line. Time-consuming tasks can be eliminated. Inaccurate prospect lists can become on-target lead generators. Out-of-sync marketing-to-sales departments handoffs can be turned into the fuel that drives a well-oiled sales and marketing machine. It’s all possible when AI-powered automation is paired with unified data to enable businesses to reach the right customer at the right time.
Whether a company chooses to implement marketing automation for just one step in its marketing and sales process or across its entire buyer’s journey, the proven strategy for marketing automation for B2B is simple as it is powerful: Get started.
To learn more about marketing automation for B2B, reach out to your Salesforce agent today.
