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Implementing Sales Automation

The Walk, Run, Fly guide is where you begin.

This is a guide for exploring and inspiring automation strategies. We will build a foundation of ideas and tactics to get you started. We will highlight best practices currently used by other companies and then link these concepts to detailed instructions for implementation within your automation platform.

While we will showcase numerous ideas in this guide, your imagination only limits automation. We want to be the spark plug in your imagination engine. Don’t limit yourself to our ideas; fly beyond our strategies and write the next chapter in automation.

Your Map

We want you to start slow with simple, high-ROI tactics that deliver big value for your company. Once you’re comfortable with the basics, we will help you grow into a sophisticated power user.

How the Guide is Organised

This guide is divided into three sections with escalating levels of sophistication – walk, run, and fly.

  • Walk – Basic automation tactics with universal value for nearly all businesses as they begin to adopt automation.
  • Run – Begin using automation to formulate high-value solutions specific to an individual business’s needs and situation.
  • Fly – Explore general strategies that build upon the tactics you have learned in Run to drive leads further, convert leads to sales and prove ROI.

These are general suggestions. If you require a specific tactic, don’t be afraid to jump to a more advanced section for guidance; if you need assistance, we will be on hand to help.

THE POWER OF AUTOMATION IS ROOTED IN AN ABILITY TO TAILOR A SPECIFIC SOLUTION FOR A BUSINESS BASED ON THE BUSINESS’S UNIQUE SALES MODEL, FUNNEL, PRODUCTS AND/OR SERVICES SOLD AND THE UNIQUE BEHAVIORS OF EACH LEAD.

 

Due to automation's very nature, the tactics and strategies in this guide are increasingly conceptual in the Run and Fly subsections. Our role is to develop ways to adapt these strategies to your business's unique circumstances.

Route to Market

For this guide, we loosely define B2B and B2C to correlate with high-involvement and low-involvement sales cycles.

Here is how we are defining B2B and B2C in this book:

B2B strategies in this guide are based on high-involvement purchases of more expensive products or services. High-value transactions characterise these businesses and typically involve longer sales cycles. Generally, each lead is more costly, and each transaction is more valuable. These types of leads consider much more information before purchasing, extending the sales cycle. Your experience purchasing a marketing automation platform for your company is likely an example of a high-involvement purchase.

With notifications, email automations and dynamic lists, marketing automation allows these businesses to convert more leads to sales while shortening the sales cycle.

WE WILL USE THE B2B AND B2C CATEGORIES AS A METHOD OF ORGANISING GENERAL STRATEGIES. HOWEVER, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER A BUSINESS IS CATEGORICALLY DEFINED AS B2B OR B2C, THERE IS TREMENDOUS VALUE IN REVIEWING STRATEGIES FROM BOTH ANGLES BEFORE APPLYING THEM TO YOUR UNIQUE SITUATION.

Before you start walking, running and flying through the world of automation, we need to have your automation platform set up correctly.

This onboarding checklist is designed for your company as an audit. When getting started with automation, we’ll go through the following process line-by-line with you. It covers every feature of the platform, and will effectively identify the next steps that need to be taken to get you up and running.

Site Tracking

  • Either access to your website is required, or a site tracking code needs to be given to your web developer to implement your site tracking code.
  • Adding a tracking code establishes the tracking of on-site visitors

List of Contacts

  • This can vary depending on your organisation. A few questions should be asked:
    • Could you let me know if you're using a CRM? If so, what?
    • Do you want to integrate or migrate?
  • Integrate: You will still be using your CRM, but API code will need to be developed for the CRM and HubSpot to work together automatically (In the case of SalesForce, no code is needed because we have an integration tool designed specifically for Salesforce)
  • Migrate: You plan on using HubSpot CRM and want to move your data across in its entirety—a migration tool (similar to the contact manager import tool).
    • In what format is your contact list?
    • It needs to be in CSV format and UTF-8 encoded

User Account

  • Email Syncing: Getting It Set Up
  • MS Exchange, Gmail
  • User roles: you need to assign roles to anyone who can access HubSpot.
  • Here are four example roles you could assign:
    • site admin
    • company manager
    • salesperson
    • jr. salesperson.

DNS/Email Settings

  • Domain Verification
    • It would be best if you verified the sending domain to ensure you have access to the domain you are sending from
  • DKIM Verification
    • DKIM adds code to your email that authorised senders can only create. This will help maximise email reputation and deliverability.
    • Set up the subdomain for landing pages

Existing Contact

Any current emails in rotation?

  • You may want to move them into your marketing automation platform.
    • Either recreate in your marketing automation platform using templates.
    • Or copy and paste HTML into the email code – you must make the copied code editable within your marketing automation platform.
  • Are there any existing forms on your site?
    • We recommend that you use your marketing automation platform
    • forms instead
      • If not, you will need to add a native form code to track submissions
    • Any current media (white papers, PDFs, videos)?
      • Make this media trackable in your marketing automation platform
      • so that you are notified when leads view the media
      • Are you interested in using the Landing Page Builder / Blog Tool?
      1. Use your marketing automation platform
      2. guidance pages for help on:
        1. Using a subdomain for landing pages
        2. Getting started with landing page builder

Lead Scoring

  1. Identify the data points and values you want to attribute points towards.

Automation

  1. Basics:
    1. Set up passive, basic automations, including:
      1. Notifications of forms being filled out
      2. Lead score notifications
    2. Diving deeper
      1. Work any existing campaigns into the SS
      2. Tailor and improve campaigns to better fit your business’s needs
  • Set up drip campaigns

Analytics

  1. Google AdWords Integration
  2. The utilisation of the tracking rules in Campaign Analytics
    1. How are you going to track the efficacy of your campaigns?
      1. UTM codes
      2. Referral URLs
      3. ‘How did you hear about us?’
    2. Set up campaigns
      1. Email drip
      2. Form fills
  • Landing pages
  1. Offline

Sales Pipeline

  1. What does your sales process look like?
    1. What stages are involved?
    2. How many pipelines?
  • Do salespeople work together on the same opportunities, or is it more separate?
    1. This will affect user roles and whether they will be salespeople or junior salespeople

  1. Integration:
    1. What type of service are you using for your shopping cart?
    2. Do you have a programmer who can generate the tracking code for the shopping cart?
  2. Are there any third-party platforms you wish to connect to (other than the shopping cart)? Either:
    1. Custom API code needs to be created
    2. Use Zapier
      1. You will need to create an account and make the third-party platform available in Make.

Misc

  1. Upload existing pictures and the company logo into the email file manager
  2. Let us know your company address/phone number/hours of operation
  3. Set up Call Tracking
  4. Set up Granular unsubscribe

Set-Up Summary

From here on in the guide, we will assume you have been through your initial onboarding meetings and finished the basic setup outlined above. We will assume:

  • The account is set up
  • Users are setup
  • A tracking code is created and posted
  • Any 3rd party services are connected to your account
  • Google AdWords is set up
  • CRM is set up
  • Webinar services are set up
  • Social Media is set up
  • Text messaging is set up
  • All forms have been converted
    • Our automation forms improve conversion rates since they can autofill information already available in the database
  • The first email is sent to drop cookies on current leads in the database

Walk

This section includes a few simple steps to get you moving in the right direction. It should deliver immediate value to your business.

Basic Notifications

Studies show that following up a prospective customer within the first hour increases your likelihood of converting them into a lead by 700%. This highlights the importance of recognizing when prospects are trying to connect with your business.

Set up automatic notifications for your sales team so they don’t waste a minute filling the top of the funnel.

Basic Notifications

The power of marketing automation is the ability to seamlessly build relationships with every lead and customer. Gratitude is an important aspect of forging a strong bond.

Set up thank you emails based on behaviours such as filling out a form, visiting from an important email or making a purchase.