Chapter 11 Tools of the Trade What Is Marketing Automation? While you may not be familiar with the terms marketing automation and lead nurturing, you’re certainly familiar with what they do. If you’re online, you interact with marketing automation platforms like Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud every day. Marketing automation, in tandem with a CRM solution like Salesforce, not only helps generate leads and push them through the sales funnel, it also helps you provide intelligence to your sales team by updating customer and lead data that they can see in the CRM system. For example: • The most recently visited pages viewed on your website by a lead • Emails opened and click-through rates with links inside those emails • Completed forms and downloaded resources • Lead scoring and alerts In short, it makes the marketing team look like a hero to the sales team. Providing sales with actionable intelligence in their CRM system to help them know whom to call, when to call, and how to close deals quickly is invaluable information to any organization. Lead Qualification, Scoring, and Routing This may seem like a pipe dream, but in reality, most startups that are aggressively pursuing a content marketing strategy will have more leads than they can realistically pursue. In addition, leads that have simply downloaded an e-book may not be ready to move on to the next stage of the sales funnel. Once integrated with Salesforce, your marketing automation platform can easily be configured to determine if a lead is ready to be worked and who it should assigned to. Lead Scoring Either within your marketing automation platform or within Salesforce, an organization can configure a metric called a lead score. Your lead score is value that helps a salesperson see at a glance whether a lead is worthy of their very finite time. As leads take actions or have certain attributes (have a VP job title, open emails, click on resources, download an e-book, look at a pricing page, and so on) their lead score will increase.