Lifecycle Automation - what's in it for me?

One of the most frequent asks we get from prospects and customers is, “How can I help sales close more business?”  

Since 2013, Measured Results Marketing has helped hundreds of companies to align Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams under a unified foundational structure that has resulted in greater inter-departmental collaboration, improved efficiency, and increased revenue.

MRM recently transformed the end-to-end sales process for one of its customers, returning 15 hours per employee to their Business Development team, so they could focus on revenue-generating activities instead of administration. 

As a result, we created this guide, called “Lifecycle Automation - what’s in it for me?” specifically for B2B companies looking to implement their own RevOps strategy. Use the tips in this guide to audit your existing sales processes, identify an ideal-state model, and automate repetitive parts of your sales process so your business development (BDR) teams can scale their efforts, improve efficiency, and bring in more revenue.

This guide is also available as a series on our blog.

Who this guide is for

• Any B2B company with separate marketing and sales teams that is looking to create a shared view – and shared ownership – of the customer lifecycle
• Companies wanting to improve user experiences for prospects, customers, and revenue generating teams
• Any organization that is looking to kickoff its RevOps strategy with a meaty project to drive aggressive goals and align teams through a One Team, One Goal approach
• Advanced RevOps organizations that are looking for advanced ideas to take their best practice implementations to the next level

What you will learn from this guide

Based on a successful real life example, you will learn how to build a shared understanding of your customer lifecycle, and the operational steps your teams can take to optimize processes, systems, and data to better meet future shifts in business goals. You will see the financial benefits that this Measured Results Marketing customer saw in their process transformation.  

Additionally, you will:

• Compare your current B2B SaaS sales process with a highly-automated and successful, sales process
• Understand the value of a highly automated model, including a better customer experience, and give your sales team more time to focus on consultative selling and winning more deals
• Learn new ideas on automation and technology use cases across the Revenue Operations Ecosystem™, including Lead Management and Opportunity Follow-up
• Gain exposure to the most important shared measurements that provide actionable intelligence and showcase your team's great work

What is Revenue Operations and Why Should I care?

Revenue Operations (RevOps), is a discipline that aligns operational efforts across the customer lifecycle. It focuses on the customer experience and includes alignment of teams under a unified structure. It enables long-term success through: 

• Better collaboration and team decision-making
• Shared ownership with complete visibility and accountability
• One source of data truth across the company
• More consistent and predictable pipeline growth
• Shortening your sales cycle and closing more deals
• Cleaner data to make better business decisions
• Reducing friction with a better end-to-end customer experience
• Generating more revenue in an efficient and scalable way

Why Should I Care About Automation?

Automation is a powerful tool that you can use to streamline your marketing, sales, and service efforts, improve customer engagement, return more time back to your BDRs, and increase your ROI. Overall, implementing appropriate automation can have a significant impact on your company's revenue, lead generation, total efficiency, and ability to make data-driven decisions. Triggered by data recorded in current or newly-created CRM fields and forms, automation performs a series of tasks, communications, notifications, calculations, and field updates to streamline CRM systems’ administration. Automation significantly reduces the likelihood of data input errors when compared to manual input. It completes tasks significantly more quickly and at a greater scale. In fact, a study by Adestra revealed 74% of marketers say that marketing automation saves them time, and 68% say that it improves efficiency.

Every step or action should be recorded as an activity in your CRM or system of record; if an email is dispatched to a Lead or Contact, that activity is recorded on the master file. Is this occurring at your organization today? 

Companies that implement marketing automation see an 8-12% increase in revenues within 6-9 months, according to Forrester Research. Often, the hurdle for companies is a knowledge gap about marketing automation, and how to leverage it for an organization’s sales process.