Sales and marketing automation is no longer optional.

According to research by McKinsey & Company, 71% of consumers now expect brands to provide personalised interactions, made possible by automation. More importantly, 76% of them feel frustrated when brands don’t deliver on this expectation. Evidently, this means that automation has become a minimum standard in the digital world, especially for large businesses. In a crowded, low-loyalty digital space, not personalizing your communications is a business risk.

What’s more, not leveraging the benefits of sales and marketing automation is also a recipe for wasted time and low productivity. A WorkMarket survey found that 54% of employee respondents believed they could save a whole 240 hours every year through automation. That amount of time is no joke – when you multiply that number by several hundreds of employees, you’re looking at an astonishing amount of wasted time if you don’t automate the right sales and marketing workflows.

Sales and marketing automation can transform how your employees work, how you interact with your customers, and how leads become customers become loyal brand advocates. But that’s not to say no one ever has any objections against automating their sales and marketing.

Sales and marketing automation calls for investment. Investment of time, knowledge, effort, and money. Regardless of the size of your business, the initial setup cost and ongoing subscription fees can be a substantial investment – one that you wouldn’t take lightly. Add to that the learning curve involved in using automation tools effectively – that’s no piece of cake.

Some players may find that the automation tools they’ve come across don’t have any use cases in their industry. Others may feel that the risk of less personal, human-based customer experiences is too big to take.

Each of these concerns is valid. But it’s important to remember that marketing automation tools aren’t replacements for a marketing strategy based on human insight. Neither are they tools that you can set up and then forget about. They streamline your operations and improve customer interactions only if you have a thorough understanding of your customer journeys and quality content that can help them each step of the way.

At the end of the day, when implemented well, sales and marketing automation offers unparalleled benefits for your business. Automation tools can perform complex tasks that would be impossible for you to implement manually at scale. Automation tools can save you time by automating repetitive tasks. It can deliver personalised communications to your customers based on their behaviours and preferences.

Automation can support your business in its growth journey, effortlessly managing an increasing volume of leads and customers. Most importantly, it can help you to accurately track and measure the performance of your marketing activities and calculate your return on your marketing spend.

Haven’t yet invested in sales and marketing automation tools for your business? You’re risking falling behind your competitors.

For starters, as we mentioned at the very beginning, a large proportion of consumers now expect that their interactions with you will be personalised to their wants and behaviours.

To add to that, if you don’t rely on automation systems to collate data, automatically segment leads and ease the handover between marketing, sales and customer success teams, you’re risking opportunities slipping through the cracks. After all, it is quite tedious to copy and paste lead or customer information into a spreadsheet or across files. You wouldn’t want the drudgery or the human errors that accompany such tasks, especially when you consider their effects on customer experience.

All the drudgery involved in manually doing tasks that could be automated also means that you have an unnecessarily long sales cycle. From scheduling meetings and nurturing leads down the sales funnel to transferring data to the sales team, assigning a sales rep and preparing quotations – there are so many steps that could extend your sales cycle. With automation, all of these tasks can happen in a fraction of the time needed to do them manually.

Every hour you spend without automating your sales and marketing is another hour you spend on inefficiencies, sub-par productivity and drudgery.

Data is the name of the game in digital marketing. If your business has any digital channels at all – be they your website, a newsletter, or your social media accounts – you’re already (or you could be) constantly collecting customer data through every digital interaction with them. This data helps you curate a holistic picture of your customers – their demographic data, the products that interest them, their goals, etc.

Marketing automation can help you leverage this data to identify the right audiences for you, quickly and at scale. It can streamline your audience segmentation and targeting processes, enabling you to tailor your messaging for each customer across all your digital channels. You may have 200 customers or 2 million; marketing automation speaks to each of them individually.

What tools do you need to make the most of what automation has to offer? Let’s take a look.

Without a doubt, your customer relationship management (CRM) tool is one of the most important automations you can implement for all the departments in your company. Your CRM is at the very centre of the sales process, supporting many other functions and activities which come before and after a sale. It is, in essence, a seamless connection between marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams.

All that data you’ve collected through your various interactions with your customers? A good CRM houses all that information in one place. When synced effectively with all your software tools, your CRM automatically gets updated with every piece of information – be it product preferences, budgets, suggested meeting times, etc. – without your employees having to log them or hunt for them manually.

At any point in the sales cycle, a marketing and sales rep need only look up a customer in the CRM to know everything there is to know about them – their age, industry, emails they’ve opened, ads they’ve interacted with, conversations they’ve had with your colleagues, contracts that you’re waiting on them to sign, and more.

The best CRMs are also updated in real time, meaning that every time you access customer data, you know you’re looking at the latest information. This is particularly effective for sales leaders to easily monitor their team’s progress through the day. It also ensures that customer activity on any one channel will be updated across your tech stack immediately, so no information slips through the cracks.

At the end of the day, CRMs are a strategic imperative. By collecting all the information they possibly can about your leads and customers, they paint a holistic picture of where your business comes from. They give you unique insight into who your ideal customers are and what drives, worries, interests, and attracts them. This information is indispensable in creating a thoughtful marketing strategy, individual campaigns, and marketing materials.

The best CRMs? HubSpot is a comprehensive solution for sales automation and customer relationship management. ActiveCampaign is a great option for small businesses looking for an integrated CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation tool (more on these below). Zoho CRM offers solutions for your entire business, from finance, legal and HR to marketing and sales automation and analytics.

It's important to remember that there’s no single approach to effective automation. Your choice of CRM will depend on the industry you’re in, the size of your business, your budget, your automation needs, and a bunch of other factors. We’ll discuss these in more detail in a little bit.

Email marketing can be a great middle-of-the-funnel lead nurturing strategy. Automating your email marketing can take multiple routes. Typically, you use an automation tool to set up email-based workflows, triggering an email to your leads every time they execute a certain action.

Did someone add some products to their online shopping cart but close the window without checking out? You can send them an automated email checking in about what the problem was.

Did a website visitor download a whitepaper from your website? You could email them personalised content based on what you’ve learned about them from their online activity.

Did someone make their first purchase from you? Send them an automated email thanking them. Set up your workflow so that a week later, they get an email asking for a product review. You can schedule an email to them for a month or so later, showing them other similar products they might be interested in.

In other words, based on some pre-determined rules, you can have your email automation tool nurture your leads and customers throughout their journey with you. Whether it’s through prescheduled drip emails or trigger-activated emails, there’s a lot you can do with an email marketing tool.

The best email marketing tool out there? Mailchimp is one of the OG email marketing services which has now expanded to become an all-in-one marketing platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Not only can it help you with audience segmentation but it can also provide support with non-email marketing channels and content optimisation through A/B testing. HubSpot also offers email marketing automation on its all-in-one platform, as do Marketo and Outreach.

Beyond data management and email, there are a range of tools to help you automate various other steps in the marketing and sales processes.

Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer can help you manage your social media accounts. From scheduling posts and monitoring engagement to generating performance analytics, these tools dramatically reduce the time you spend distributing content and ensuring consistency across platforms.

Through the prospecting stage, tools like ZoomInfo, Clearbit, and Clay help you enrich contact data. This automates your lead generation, providing you with firmographic and technographic insights using which you can personalize your outreach.

In the process of optimising targeting and prioritising high-value leads, tools like TechTarget and Demandbase can track online behaviours to show you high-intent accounts.

HubSpot and Marketo automate essential parts of the marketing process. They automate lead nurturing, content personalization, and multi-channel campaigns. This not only helps you with lead scoring but it also ultimately drives efficiency in your campaign execution.

PandaDoc and Docusign can even automate proposal creation, delivery and e-signature workflows for you. Nothing like these tools to reduce your manual labour and shorten your sales cycle.

This is quite a list but it’s still not comprehensive. From analytics, customer support, and lead generation to all-in-one platforms that offer multiple such functionalities, there’s a plethora of automation tools to enhance and scale your marketing and sales efforts.

Across this range of tools, you would have noticed that most automation technologies leverage the interplay between content, marketing, sales, and after-sales teams.

For instance, by collating customer data at every stage of their journey with you, CRMs offer a solution that can be used by sales, marketing, product, finance, legal, logistics, and other departments across your organisation. All without the need for complex and time-consuming handover processes. All without the risk of human errors.

This cross-functional usefulness can be achieved using integrations. This means that you can integrate all your automation tools so that when data is updated in any one software, the change reflects across your tech stack.

What’s better than integrations? All-in-one marketing and sales automation platforms like HubSpot.

At the end of the day, effective automation breaks down silos in your organisation. Not only do they optimise communications between members of your organisation and customers but they also enhance interdepartmental alignment. Ultimately, this results in more effective campaigns, higher quality leads, and a more attractive bottom line.

Which parts of the marketing and sales processes can be automated? Almost all of them.

Automated processes are guided by workflows. Workflows are the sets of instructions based on which your automation tools will initiate certain actions. Depending on the tool that you choose, setting up these workflows will have varying levels of complexity – some tools are more technical while others are quite user-friendly, with drag-and-drop functionalities that dramatically simplify the process. You could set up your workflows using templates, build a custom one from scratch, or modify existing campaigns to optimise them based on new data.

Either way, before you automate your workflows, you need to identify and clearly define them. These workflows may be simple or highly sophisticated. They may be limited to email and WhatsApp or may encompass your entire range of digital channels. Whatever they may be, you must have a thorough understanding of your customer journeys to clearly articulate and define these workflows.

Did a prospect fill a form on your website? Your automation tool can send a notification to a sales rep to get in touch with them.

Did they attend one of your webinars? You can set up drip emails to ask them for their feedback on the session, recommend products they may be interested in, or share an appointment scheduling link for them to set up an initial appointment with a sales rep.

Need your sales reps to have a conversation with an economic decision-maker before completing the discovery stage? An automation tool can ensure that that box is checked before you move forward.

Need to ensure that your legal team reviews a contract before it is sent to a client? Set up an automated internal workflow that ensures this process is followed.

But just because you can automate something doesn’t mean you should. After all, the point of marketing and sales automation is to make each customer’s journey more personalised. They shouldn’t feel like they’re interacting with a robot. That’s where you have to be strategic about which workflows you automate, balancing automated workflows with human interaction. Human insight is critical to this. (More on this soon.)

As we’ve discussed, your workflows don’t have to be templatized. With the powerful automation technologies at your disposal today, you can integrate custom code to tailor your workflows to the unique journey your customers have.

What’s more, artificial intelligence (AI)-based automation technologies can help you take things a step further. For instance, AI-powered chatbots, like the ones Hootsuite offers. Conversation intelligence tools like Gong which can analyse sales calls, pull important details from them, and give you AI-powered insights about the opportunity. They can also give sales managers insights that will help them provide personalised coaching to members of their team.

AI-based softwares can also help you with pipeline management, with AI detecting red flags in opportunities in your pipeline based on deviations from standard KPIs. Not to forget the power of generative AI in creating SEO content, drafting emails, generating call summaries, and crafting sales reports. All of these functionalities together help sales leaders create accurate revenue forecasts.

The automation tools available to you today are extremely powerful. But that power means nothing if you don’t know how to leverage these tools to achieve your goals. That’s where human insight becomes critical – you must have deep insight into your customers, how leads flow through your sales funnels, and the strategic prowess to determine which workflows you should automate and which you should leave as is.

Step one always includes mapping and auditing the processes that already exist in your organisation. Map every possible touchpoint that may occur in the customer journey, identify inefficiencies in them, and devise ways to remedy the problems. Once you’ve got a successful workflow in place, automate it to scale successful efforts, minimise errors, conserve time, and personalize communications.

We’ve covered the variety of sales and marketing automation tools available today. Depending on the size of your business, the processes that you want to automate, your budget, and multiple other factors, some tools may work better for you than others. You may choose only a few tools and integrate them to work together. Or you may choose all-in-one platforms that cover the full spectrum of marketing and sales activities. You may need the help of an expert to not only implement and manage but also select the right tools for your business.

You don’t have to go all in at once. It is always good to start small – automate one workflow and assess the results. Iterate based on what you learn until you arrive at the workflow that works perfectly for your needs. Continuous testing and iteration of automated workflows are key to ensuring that they consistently and reliably deliver what you expect them to.

Developed a workflow that works just right? It’s time to scale it. You may scale it to more teams, for other products, other processes, and beyond. Continuous iteration gives you deep insight into what is working for you and what isn’t. Use this insight to scale your automation efforts, stay relevant in a constantly evolving digital marketing landscape, and reach leads you haven't yet tapped.

We promised we’d talk about the role of human beings in the automation landscape, so here we are. Automation tools make it unnecessary for humans to get involved in the tedious parts of marketing and sales. They make it possible to do a lot more with much less time and money. They make it possible to personalize communications in a way that people just can’t do.

Regardless, marketing and sales automation tools are nothing without human insight. Like a pen without a writer. Or a bunch of instruments with no musicians.

Selling is, at the end of the day, about relationships. People don’t buy from companies or websites or tools. They buy from other people.

We, at Purple Turtle, are committed to helping our clients retain that human touch and build those human relationships that drive community, growth and loyalty in the long run.

At Turtle, we’re all for using automation to increase customer joy and achieve the results your marketing efforts deserve. This means that we balance insightful strategies built by humans with data-driven automation to connect with your ideal customers on a deeper level.

With Purple Turtle, you get the perfect mix of human and digital interventions. Keen human eyes that identify and articulate what makes you you. Plus digital strategies – automation and all – to convert prospects into delighted customers and over time, build an army of loyal advocates. Advocates that recognise and appreciate you for the purple cow that you are in a field of brown.