Sales Automation vs Marketing Automation – Comparison & Tools

In this article, we are going to discuss sales automation vs marketing automation. Here, you’ll learn about the differences between both automation techniques and the best tool that can help you achieve amazing results in both.

Sales Automation

Sales Automation is the automation of processes that helps sales representatives to interact with leads and close the sales process. CRM software is the perfect solution for automating sales processes as it has tremendous tools for sales automation.

The processes of the sales cycle that can be automated are

1. Lead management- 

• Everyone in the organization can get complete access to their customers’ interaction which guides them to take the next step.
• How to close the deal when a lead becomes your customer.
• CRM software offers AI-powered lead conversion scores through which you can prioritize your leads. 

2. Forecasting

• You will get alerts and notifications based on sales forecasts and pipelines.

3. Management of business processes-

• You can organize and streamline complex business processes. 
• You can create and customize templates for any of the processes.

Sales Automation Helps in: 

• Boosting your team’s productivity,
• Increases leads conversion to customers
• Reduces the time taken in the sales processes
• To gather and store meaningful information
• It gives you time to concentrate on critical productive activities as it saves you time from the daily repetitive tasks.

Sales automation is used after lead generation to close sales. The leads are already generated in the marketing process. Sales automation starts with the interaction with the generated leads till the closing of the sales. It does not include reaching out to the audience and telling them about your brand.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the automation of many marketing processes like lead generation, analysis of marketing campaigns, email marketing, tracking web and email interactions, lead scoring, etc. It allows you to send personalized messages to your leads by automatic tracking and scoring.  Automation also allows you to reach out to all the prospects & leads you have collected in your virtual address book over the years and laser-target them with the strategic ad-campaigns

Some of the marketing automation features-

• Email Marketing- Creating drip email campaigns with dynamic content.
• Tracking leads activity and journey- You can track and get an insight into your leads’ engagement with your website. 
• Run marketing campaigns- you can give customers personalized messages at any stage of the customer lifecycle.
• Predict lead scoring- With advanced AI-integrated tools, you can also score and predict qualified leads.
• Promote on social media platforms- You can run social media campaigns, schedule and automate posts and create brand awareness.
• Build web pages and web forms- you can customize web pages and create forms for customers and leads knowing their feedback and opinions about your brand.
• Dashboards and reports- You can see your marketing performance through reports and interactive dashboards. You will be able to know how to improve your performance and what areas to work on.

You must create unique content at every stage of the customer’s life cycle.

Sales Automation vs Marketing Automation Comparison

Here is the detailed Sales Automation vs Marketing Automation comparison.

	Sales Automation	Marketing Automation
Tasks	The entire sales pipeline is managed by sales automation.	Capturing and nurturing leads, and optimizing and running marketing campaigns.
Starting point	It is started as soon as the leads are generated till the closing of the deals. It is implemented at the growth stage of the business.	It is started from the very beginning of reaching out to audience and running marketing campaigns.
Purpose	Closing deals	Generating leads
Tools for its implementation	CRM, emails, SMSs, calls, etc.	CRM, social media, website content, and other advertising platforms.

Best Sales and Marketing Automation Tool

SuiteCRM Email Drip Campaign

Email drip campaign– Sending customized and personalized emails to customers and leads automated at scheduled times or triggered by their actions or behavior. This helps in more lead generation and conversion of them to customers. It increases customers’ and leads’ engagement with your brand. 

By this extension of SuiteCRM, you can get an insight into your customers’ behavior, segregate the audience and then frame personalized your sales deck for them.

Features 

• Observe and analyze customers’ behavior based on their interaction with your company. 
• Automate monotonous repetitive tasks.
• To customize and personalize interaction with your audience.
• Schedule emails for the target audience and send them at predefined times.
• Segregate communication for different segments of the audience.
• A dashboard is provided where you can check your email campaign status and see the progress report. Through this, you can make changes for improvement and also this will help you in your future performance.
• There is an AI debugger that detects any error in the SuiteCRM.
• Its cost is $199.

This plugin helps you to reach your target audience in the most efficient and effective manner and have more sales. Also, it is cost-effective and gives better ROI than traditional marketing methods.

Conclusion

Sales and marketing are the most crucial step of a business. The ultimate goal of every business is to have more and more sales and generate revenues. Automating sales and marketing tasks helps businesses a lot in concentrating more on their production activities and saves time and money. Businesses must have knowledge of sales and marketing automation and the difference between the two. So that they can perform better.