What is the difference between Marketing and Sales Automation?

If you are choosing between marketing automation and sales automation, what would make the most sense to you? Marketing automation is an excellent tool to manage, nurture, and qualify a large number of leads that you have in your database, but it isn't meant to be used by salespeople to drive specific deals. As of today, 53% of B2B companies use marketing automation, and 37% plan to do so soon. In 2023, 85% of sales tasks will be automated, up from 40% previously.

This article will dive into the similarities and contrasts between marketing automation and sales automation tools to help you determine when to use them. 

What is marketing automation?

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An effective marketing automation program measures and analyzes all marketing activities to qualify leads before they are handed over to sales. One-to-many communications are executed through emails, social media, and other marketing campaigns.

Features 

Here are some of the features that marketing automation platforms bring with them:

Tracking codes and monitoring certain online behaviors are part of Marketing Intelligence.

It involves email marketing automation, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and content marketing.

Advanced Workflow Automation - This includes both the internal marketing processes and the functions of the organization.

Benefits: 

Marketing automation services benefit businesses in the following ways:

• Assists in the right engagement with the best CRMs and generates quality leads.
• Operation scales up faster than previously.
• The service is entirely cost-effective. Time and resources are also saved.

FunnelBud says marketing automation is a tool that captures, segments, and communicates with all of your contacts to help you run your marketing more effectively.

What is sales automation? 

Sales automation streamlines sales processes. Ensuring qualified leads and opportunities do not slip through the cracks, accelerates the sales process by covering all activities within the sales pipeline. This includes negotiating and nurturing clients.

Benefits - Sales automation services

Logging non-sales activities such as emails and phone calls automatically is part of automated activity logging. 

• An automated call record creation system helps businesses collect information about leads of all sizes and forms who visit their websites or attend events.
• Follow-up activities can be automated at preset intervals through automated communication.
• It is possible to assign leads automatically based on their criteria using automated lead management.
• In order to keep their deals moving forward, automated guidance reminds the sales reps what else they need to do. 

What’s the difference? 

In light of the definitions of marketing and sales automation, you may wonder what the difference between them is. They both have similar features, but they work differently. Understanding what makes them unique can have a profound impact on your business.

Communication

A marketing automation tool lets you execute one-to-many communications through a variety of channels, such as email, social media, or your website. You can control how that content is delivered, emailed, or outputted. The only difference is that it doesn't allow one-to-one communications like a sales automation tool. 

An automated sales process can enhance conversion rates by nurturing conversations with prospects one-on-one.

Processes

Sales automation facilitates all internal workflows to streamline your sales pipeline, whereas marketing automation manages and automates all marketing touchpoints. 

Using marketing automation, a prospect will continue to receive information about a feature if they fill out a lead form for it. An automated sales process enables the sales team to engage and qualify prospects based on their request to learn more about a feature.

Data

Compared to marketing automation, sales automation allows you to gain a closer view of prospect interactions within the sales funnel. 

The data from marketing campaigns will be presented to you through marketing automation. The data from sales automation will inform you where prospects are in the pipeline based on lead activity. Sales teams can be more strategic with their approach to converting a lead when they have more insight into the actions a prospect has taken. 

Actions

From the very beginning of a customer's buying journey, marketing automation needs to take a number of actions, including building a client base and nurturing leads.

In marketing automation, leads are matured while in sales automation, lead scores are tracked and deals are closed. The scores are used by reps to understand where the leads are in the buying cycle.

Responsibility

As a general rule, marketing departments are primarily responsible for retaining leads within the organization, so marketing automation is required to nurture the leads so that they end up converting. In light of this, the primary responsibility is to ensure that the marketing flow in the lead generation cycle is optimized.

Sales automation platforms, on the other hand, make calls to already scheduled meetings with leads

Implementation

One of the biggest challenges in sales and marketing automation is deciding when to implement it. Marketing automation can be applied to every stage of a customer's buying journey, starting with demand generation and ending with customer loyalty.

Compared to marketing automation, sales automation can be skipped if the business is new. Or, it can be combined with marketing automation when the number of customers and leads is low.

Conclusion

Ultimately, marketing automation tools are best at streamlining marketing efforts for lead generation, while sales automation tools are more capable of converting leads into clients by setting up processes. By understanding the differences between the two tools, you will be able to choose the one that best meets your needs.