A key component of marketing success is handing prospects over to sales for them to be converted into customers. Therefore, marketers should be nurturing prospects and getting them ready for sales and making things as easy as they can for sales to bring it home.
Marketing automation can help.
Enabling Sales Teams with Email Templates
RelationshipOne had Ashley Wylie, the Digital, Outbound, and Database Marketing Manager for Lenovo, on as a guest on episode 58 of the Inspired Marketing Podcast. She spoke about how her team is rolling out a fresh Oracle Eloqua instance as a part of a larger project. They are helping to build an internal development team to help the marketing side better contribute to their sales team’s efforts to drive and progress opportunities. As a part of this, they are introducing Oracle Eloqua Engage templates to their sales reps, as to have more consistent messaging. Oracle Eloqua Engage is a tool that lets sales professionals customize, send, and track pre-built email templates.
Wylie has over a decade of marketing experience, much of it in the digital realm and working with outbound and email marketing. She handles her team’s Oracle Eloqua database and its related integrations, such as:
- Tracking lead growth
- Data hygiene
- Governance
- Outbound marketing efforts, including email sends and nurtures
She has been working to enable her sales team with tools to enhance engagement with customers. This is being done by:
- Oracle Eloqua Profiler providing ready-to-go emails
- Sales then using Oracle Eloqua Engage to send those emails out, featuring information about solutions and topics customers might be interested in
A major goal is to bring relevance and timeliness to these conversations with customers.
How Marketing Can Support Sales in Working with Oracle Eloqua
The project steps involved:
- Wylie working with her field marketing manager to create a series of default templates that could be used to craft unique messages
- Wylie and her field marketing manager also working on several campaign-specific templates, which sales could then use to send their own emails through Oracle Eloqua
- Once the documentation was finished, sales went through training in how to work with the templates
As the project has progressed and evolved, they are now working on event invitations and a door opener campaign and doing what they can to encourage sales reps to use Oracle Eloqua in conjunction with other efforts that marketing can help support.
With such a project, it is vital to get sales leadership onboard with marketing initiatives right away. Then they can help promote and drive usage of the tools on their teams. There might even people on the sales team who could serve as evangelists who can help push the tool and its benefits to his or her teammates.
However, marketing should still provide training and support for sales reps, such as:
- How-to documents
- Video recordings for on-demand training,
- Both team and one-on-one training sessions
Consolidating all your audiences to a single instance of Oracle Eloqua will help make efficiency gains and maximize customer outreach efforts, as well as make the tool simpler to use and bring more clarity to what marketing is trying to achieve. It will also help you:
Better More Relevant Conversations
Wylie’s marketing team use Oracle Eloqua to track digital interaction data and Oracle Eloqua Profiler to share that data with sales. Then sales reps can see what is of interest to their contacts, which will help them:
- Set up alerts for when contacts visit the website
- Provide value to contacts with timely, interesting information delivered in a way that suits a customer’s preferences based upon their digital behavior
With marketing and sales working together in this way and sharing data (and working off the same email templates), you can:
- Ensure more consistent messaging and brand visual identity
- Improve the customer experience with better and more relevant conversations
Remember that marketing and sales are always having conversations, too. They need to be open with each other and aligned. The better they can work together, the better you can understand your customers and engage with them.
A marketer’s success depends upon how they can help sales sell. Learn how to “Do More with Sales Enablement.”