The concept of having your sales and marketing work collaboratively to create an effective account-based marketing strategy is nothing new, but where most organizations seem to fall short is execution.
More often than not, this is due to a disconnect or misalignment between the two departments, ultimately resulting in missed opportunities. Typically, this is caused by the sales team and their need to meet their daily quota of “touch points”, which can cause them to lose focus and not spend enough time on “hot leads”. In other scenarios, the cause can be due to the marketing team’s inability or failed efforts to break through the “noise” resulting from an influx of irrelevant or unqualified leads, which in turn wastes valuable sales reps time, causing frustration and loss of trust between the teams.
With these obstacles facing so many organizations, there must be a tool that allows sales and marketing teams to scale their new lead qualification pipeline process and nurture leads that show promise while qualifying those that are ready to talk, without the need for additional headcount.
By combining a sales engagement platform such as Outreach or SalesLoft with an Automated Virtual Assistant, this can be achieved. In fact, our data shows that organizations that have done this, have attained:
- 3x more SQLs without adding headcount
- 35% increase in rep productivity
- 19.5% increase in quota attained
- 25% more qualified leads handed over to sales
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Is there a difference between an Automated Virtual Assistant and a Sales Engagement platform?
Common sales engagement tools like Hubspot or Salesloft give users the ability to execute outreach at scale and empower sales teams to automate and streamline the sales process, saving time and money. They also allow your sales and marketing efforts to work in tandem to create a unified and personalized approach to your sales journey.
With this in mind, you might be asking yourself if a sales engagement tool does all of that, why do I need to invest in having an Automated Virtual Assistant?
Simply put, unlike with a live rep, an Automated Virtual Assistant allows you to make sure all your leads are followed up with, nurtured, identified as sales-ready, and finally handed over by booking a meeting with a live rep.
Furthermore, an Automated Virtual Assistant designed with Artificial Intelligence learns from interactions with leads, and over time, effectively nurtures, qualifies, and hands over pre-qualified leads to a live sales rep, all without any intervention from a human being.
Scale your Account-based marketing by combining Automated Virtual Assistants & Sales Engagement Tools
There are endless benefits when combining these two tools, but let’s just focus on the main ones:
No lead left behind
With most sales teams tiering their leads, it’s up to the live sales reps to focus the majority of their time and energy on what’s considered to be a top tier lead.
So where does that leave the lower tiered leads who are not ready to convert at the moment, but have potential? Enter in the Automated Virtual Assistant with sales engagement capabilities. The Automated Virtual Assistant will do all the heavy lifting to convert those “colder” leads through outreach and nurturing, and once qualified, will be handed over to a live sales rep as a top tier lead.
In fact, it takes an average of sixteen touch points to receive a response from a lead, with most live reps giving up after the first “no”. This leaves most leads unconverted due to a lack of bandwidth for future follow up on behalf of the live rep.
Taking the proactive approach
By connecting your Automated Virtual Assistant with your CRM, you allow new inbound leads to automatically enter the qualification process. This once again allows the Automated Virtual Assistant to do the heavy lifting and categorize new inbound leads into relevant cadences based on their unique characteristics (Industry, persona, role, etc.) instead of waiting around to be scored as a high or low tier lead, saving live reps time and increasing efficiency. If and when an inbound lead becomes qualified, the Automated Assistant will automatically hand over the lead to the live sales rep.
Augmenting Sales & Marketing Productivity
Combining technologies that allow you to increase your workforce without the need for additional headcount is not only the more effective strategy, but is also the more cost efficient one.
Through the use of advanced technology such as automation and artificial intelligence, organizations now have the ability to increase ROI, improve internal operational efficiency, and increase productivity in a manner that is truly unprecedented.
To explore further how Automated AI is redefining the lead nurturing and qualification processes while reducing costs, click here.
