You may have seen our announcement a few weeks ago about our CRM, Sales and Marketing Automation solution. You are probably familiar with the objectives of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, but what is sales and marketing automation?

Sales and marketing automation is the set of processes and tactics that efficiently nurture your prospects with personalised, useful content and helps convert those prospects into customers – with the aid of automation software.

So, sales and marketing automation is more than just software?

Absolutely. Sales and marketing automation starts with defining not only what you are selling, but exactly who you are selling to.

In the racing and breeding industry, you are not just selling shares in horses or stallion services. You are selling a dream, a value-adding service, and a variety of horses each with different characteristics and at different price points. 

You are also selling to multiple types of clients and prospects. Each have their own budget and lists of “must haves” and “preferences”, and each follow different processes when deciding on whether to buy your horses or send their broodmare to your stallions. 

Some require a personal touch (face-to-face, on the phone) and some prefer email and online information. Some progress quickly through to a purchase decision, whereas others need a lot of supporting information and comfort.

Segmenting your clients and prospects based on their preferences AND how they prefer to buy, is a great starting point when implementing software to aid your sales and marketing efforts.

Start with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution

A CRM solution such as the one we implement for clients and integrate with our Prism modules, is a must.

It should be a central hub that connects all contact information, marketing communication and sales activity together. This combination will enable you to do so much more than just keep a record of your contacts and their contact details.

Use various various sales and marketing tactics

As mentioned earlier, clients and prospects differ in the way they progress through the “lifecycle” of your sales process. 

Lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, email automation, personal follow ups and sales pipeline management are all tactics that can be selectively chosen. Choosing the right tactics and the right balance between “inform” and “sell” messages, is critical.

Automating many of those tactics with a good CRM, Sales & Marketing Automation solution will not only save you time, it will help tailor each tactic to the individuals making the purchase decision.

It is more than just email marketing

Email Marketing is clearly a key component of any sales and marketing process. Yes, other channels have grown rapidly in recent years (such as social media), but those channels simply funnel more contacts into your business. You then engage with those contacts in a variety of ways, most importantly, via email.

Email marketing can be grouped into three subsets:

1. Email broadcasts, or “blasts” out to your entire database. OK for newsletters, but not for selling!
2. Auto-Email Responders to email information to a new contact. Perfect for immediately satisfying your new prospect with the information they requested.
3. Dynamic, behavioural-based email marketing. Allow your audience to effectively choose their own journey and follow their own decision process.

Each of these three email marketing tactics has a role to play. But if you are not yet adopting auto-email responders and dynamic email marketing in your sales process, with the aid of a Sales & Marketing Automation solution, there is great risk that your marketing is both less effective and less efficient.

What is the best sales and marketing automation system?

In short, it depends on the scale and characteristics of your business. There are many solutions available. 

If your sales process is more transactional and email-oriented, solutions with Campaign Management and Dynamic Email Marketing features can add tremendous value. 

If your sales process is almost entirely manual to suit your customer buying processes, then other solutions are easier to manually interact with.

Always, choosing the right platform is about choosing the right implementation partner - the one who has spent years configuring solutions and related processes that suit the thoroughbred racehorse industry. 

We hope you consider that partner to be us.

Find out more about our service