And for nearly all the years we have spent in marketing, we’ve heard of this mythical thing called “Marketing and Sales Alignment.” The theme of the legend is that marketing and sales should be aligned in both strategy and execution in order to achieve greater results – for a more prosperous kingdom.
This not only requires both teams to agree upon the journey that their buyers go through, but also to have visibility into that journey from start to finish so that both teams can have maximum impact on it.
Enter Marketo Sales Insight (MSI).
MSI is a native Force.com app that can be installed by Salesforce users when their Salesforce and Marketo instances are integrated, or with Microsoft Dynamics. It provides Salesforce/Microsoft Dynamics users a window into the digital body language of their leads and contacts. This window gives them access to information that can provide immeasurable insights into how and why to engage leads and contacts.
For example, a sales rep can see that a lead completed a form to download a particular whitepaper or case study and that they also visited other relevant pages on the website. A typical sales conversation following a download may start with, “I see you downloaded the whitepaper about our Z99 Widget. Do you have any questions I can answer about it?”
But if the rep noticed the lead also visited web pages about leasing or financing, they can jumpstart the conversation at the next level: “I see you downloaded the white paper about our Z99 Widget. Most of our clients use our streamlined leasing program to simplify their purchase and expedite the resolution of their widget problems. Is that how you’d prefer to do it?”
While that’s a dramatization, you get the idea – it’s an excellent sales datapoint!
Related: Marketo online courses for any skill level, including MCE prep!
MSI + Lead Scoring
The digital body language is typically used in conjunction with a lead scoring model that can highlight the most “valuable” leads as defined by their engagement level and/or demographic and firmographic data. This information can then be used to help sales reps prioritize their activity through an MSI interface called “Best Bets,” which lists leads and contacts according to the parameters established by sales.
In addition to visibility into digital body language in near real-time, MSI also provides a mechanism for marketing to provide Salesforce/Microsoft Dynamics users with convenient email templates. These can be used to quickly send fully branded emails to leads or contacts using Marketo’s email engine for better deliverability and full email tracking – including sends, opens and clicks.
Marketing can also expose automated campaigns through MSI, allowing Salesforce/Microsoft Dynamics users to add leads or contacts directly into those marketing campaigns as necessary.
In short, Marketo Sales Insight is the stuff of legend! And by “legend,” I mean that elusive Holy Grail called “Marketing / Sales Alignment.” With MSI, marketers can deliver an unprecedented level of meaningful information to their sales counterparts – in the context and interface they’re already using – thereby turning myth into reality.
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