TalkTalk Business: What Does Marketing Automation Do?

Video

Nick Hill, CRM Manager at TalkTalk Business, explains how marketing automation is invaluable for their organisation, discussing how it drives alignment between sales and marketing and automatically nurtures buyers through the buying journey.

This clip is from our webcast "TalkTalk Business: Lead Management Challenges Licked" in association with CRM Technologies Ltd. Click here to watch the full webcast on-demand.

[Nick Hill:] So, what does marketing automation do? For us, it underpins that integrated pipeline between sales and marketing, it provides a bit of a seamless journey from the point of interest all the way through to the point of evaluation and justification, and then hopefully, purchase. We try to manage that process here at TalkTalk Business using marketing automation to pass people from marketing right across through to sales and then to support them through that sales process as well. What it also does is it pries into some of the real mechanisms to understand what defines our conversion rates, so the different sources that we might be using to bring these leads into business, how we're treating these leads and then how they're converted and how quickly - speed is just as important for us as conversion rate - how long does it take for a lead to convert into a sale, and how can we shorten that buyers journey down and that pipeline down so that we get our revenue in our books quicker than we might have previously done.

Equally, marketing automation allows us to nurture people through that buyers journey, so as I've just spoken about, there's a couple of phases people go through in terms of the learning phase, the education phase, the justification stage - we try to nurture people through that phase by serving them up content as they go through that buyers journey. So as they're learning and evaluating, we would try to provide people with relevant content so that we're in that evaluation shortlist, if you like, and we're recognise them as genuine leads into our business in that they're sales ready - they're in that point in the journey to make a decision, to actually purchase a product, and we can walk them through that process and support them because we know where they are in the buyer journey.

Also, it allows us to accelerate demand across our prospects as well, so using different tactics which I'll come to on this later, we can help to try and accelerate people through that buying process and get them to choose use as their supplier as opposed to our competitors out on the marketplace. So again, to reaffirm the points we talked through there, there's some real compounding stats around nurturing leads and the impact that that has had on us driving leads.