Sales and Marketing Automation: How to align their workflow to 2x revenue [Dashly example]

We all know that the sales team’s major KPI is the number of closed deals, while the marketing team’s one is the number of leads collected. In pursuit of their KPIs, marketers often acquire so cold leads that sales reps will never sell anything. That sets off a lose-lose battle where marketers spend thousands of dollars on low-quality campaigns and sales reps waste time on customers who won’t buy anything.

The fix?  

Sales and marketing automation.

We’ve talked to Polina, Growth Marketer, and Paul, Head of Sales at Dashly to learn from their experience. Together will discover mistakes in marketing and sales processes and how they approached them with automation.

Spoiler: Instead of hiring an extra sales force and wasting money on ads, the teams aligned on their collaboration and sales and marketing automation software.

You can watch the video or read the article below.

Mistake 1:  Implementing sales and marketing automation with zero knowledge about the entire customer journey

Lead generation is usually the responsibility of marketers. They pass the collected leads to sales reps. The challenge is that both teams have no idea of what’s going on with a customer at other stages.

Sales reps don’t know if leads collected by marketers are hot or cold, and marketers don’t know what happens with their leads later as they continue running ads and collecting low-quality leads who don’t buy anything.

How it used to be

There are two major funnels in Dashly marketing automation.

• Self-service: a user journeys from signing up to paying for the platform independently. It’s also called an auto funnel.
• Sales funnel: after a user signs up, a sales rep calls to convert them to a paid plan.

Marketers didn’t even think about that part of the funnel that the sales reps were in charge of. This year, we looked at how leads converted to payment and it dawned on us that team collaboration is definitely a growth area for us.

How we fixed that:

We built our current funnel in marketing and sales. Using a board in Miro, we described how leads converted to signups and demos and what sales reps were doing at each stage. We also measured the current conversion rates of all stages.

Part of the marketing automation funnel where marketers passes users to sales.

When marketers explored how the sales team dealt with customers, they implemented automation to pass leads to sales:

• They warn sales about the upcoming lead campaign. Sales reps have their day-to-day tasks, and they can’t just give up their work to call 400 leads quickly.
• Marketers tell more about the campaign to make calls effective. Sales reps should know about the offer to see what interests their leads.
• When qualifying a lead, you should determine their role in a company so sales reps know how to talk to them. Your lead may be a product manager, a marketer, sales team lead, support team lead, or even a CEO.
• Marketers inform sales reps about the campaign’s start in a special Slack channel. They tell who they are acquiring, how many, and when sales reps need to call them.

Marketers also need to specify the SLA. When the sales team approves it, marketers start the campaign.

We created a marketing automation checklist in Notion:

Leads go from Dashly to amoCRM via the standard marketing automation integration

The sales team also rearranged some processes. They assigned an MDR — a manager responsible for primary lead qualification. If a user leaves their real phone number, a manager calls them to find out their objectives, traffic volume, and role in a company.

If we can solve the user’s tasks — an MDR schedules a demo session and assigns the lead to another sales rep for a more detailed conversation.

Mistake 2: Sales and marketing managers are not hypothesizing together

Teams working asynchronously set different objectives. Marketers launch campaigns and collect leads, and sales do their best to convert leads to deals. When a company can’t generate the desired revenues, the question arises: are sales reps bad at their work, or do marketing automation collects low-quality leads?

How it used to be

Marketers only cared about metrics in advertising accounts and had no clue about what was happening to their leads. The team didn’t know how much they were going to earn. Hence, the team didn’t know how much they could invest in advertising.

How we fixed that

We approached our marketing campaigns differently.

You need to know your funnel to budget your marketing automation. The teams learned about unit economics. Each campaign is treated as a hypothesis. Marketers know their key metrics on each stage, and how many leads will convert to buying. This helps us avoid campaigns that we know will not pay off. Some campaigns only need to be launched if our sales team works on the leads.

Mistake 3: Sales managers don’t share feedback on leads

When marketing passes leads to sales, we need to know if we collected quality leads. We can collect many leads that won’t convert. This campaign should be stopped in time so that the team’s time and money are not wasted.

How it used to be:

Marketers passed leads to sales in a chaotic manner:

We decided to ask sales to call these leads. But sales reps told us that these leads were bad.

How we fixed that:

We created a ritual to teach teams to give feedback. The ritual was called “the lead committee”.

Marketing and sales teams participated in these meetings. Sales reps reported all leads they got from the marketing team over the last one or two weeks.

Then, teams discussed how many leads are on a particular stage of the funnel, how many of them bounced, how many deals are closed, and how the remaining leads should be processed.

Let’s say 80% of the campaign leads didn’t proceed to demos because they didn’t even have their websites. It means we shouldn’t scale this campaign because it brings us bad leads.

If leads are not ready for a demo yet, there’s a chance to “nurture” them. Marketers jump in on each stage, for example, sending personalized emails to each segment.

Mistake 4: not using marketing and sales automation software for lead scoring

Marketers can collect thousands of leads in just one campaign. A sales rep’s call with a potential customer usually lasts for one hour. If all collected leads are passed to sales, they just won’t be physically able to process all of them.

That’s why we needed to evaluate leads that marketers pass to sales. This would make the sales reps’ work easier as they would know who to call first.

How Dashly campaigns leads are scored and passed to sales

We invented the term “valid lead” meaning:

• They have a website.
• They have a certain volume of traffic.
• We can engage the person.
• They have tasks that our platform can solve.

If a valid lead rejects a demo proposal from a sales rep, they go through a self-service funnel and configure the platform on their own.

If we can’t mark a lead as “valid”, we pass it to marketing for “nurturing”, and an MDR emails them:

2. Score and prioritize leads with Dashly AI using answers to the qualification questions the chatbot asked clients.

3. Manage all of them them in the lead database:

Mistake 5: having no idea of who you are selling to

When teams see the product audience differently, they set different objectives. That was our case before we described the buyer personas. If teams can’t set the right objectives, they can’t develop a customer strategy. As a result, they lose money.

How we fixed that in Dashly sales

We defined the ICP which is the Ideal Customer Profile.

For us, these are the companies:

• From a particular segment;
• Operating in particular markets;
• Having substantial website traffic;
• Having certain company roles.

The ICP concept can be used to find leads, position your product, or set up an ad campaign.

We mostly stick to the ICP when looking for customers. We know for sure what companies we’re looking for. We have success stories to show them and we know how to meet their needs. When we collect a lead from the ICP company, we match the person’s role to the key buyer personas. It helps us understand what tasks they have and what we can offer.

During a meeting, our sales reps can tell the lead’s objectives and their pains from similar stories. If a customer confirms that it’s their case, sales reps describe how we can solve their issues.

This model helps our marketing teams design campaigns and formulate offers to acquire new customers.

“Pains” of a marketer. This is a part of a presentation of customer pains that Dashly can cure

How to deliver hot leads from marketing to sales: automation checklist

• Describe your target leads so sales reps consider them valid. Define the ICP and the buyer personas.
• Define where you can find these people and what you can offer them.
• Remove leads with incorrect data, for example, invalid phone numbers.
• Prioritize leads using these criteria.
• Find active leads, like the ones who read some of your emails. Then choose the ones who visited your website. You’ll have a list of the most and the least perspective leads to work on.
• Collect feedback from sales. Then, decide on your campaign based on metrics that are close to the end of the funnel, not the ones from your advertising account.

FAQ on how to automate sales and marketing workflow

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