For a business to be successful, it needs to have a sales team that can sell products or services to customers. However, selling is not easy, and it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to be successful. Many businesses use marketing automation tools to make things easier for the sales team. While marketing automation tools can be helpful, they should not be used as a good sales engagement strategy. 

 

Both automation and sales engagement can be ideal for your organization as they complement each other very effectively. However, recognizing the differences between the two is crucial since they serve different objectives according to the requirements and circumstances.

 

In this blog post, we will explore the differences between these two concepts and how you can use them to improve your business.

 

Sales Engagement and Marketing Automation

Before we talk about the differentiation between sales engagement and marketing automation, let’s be familiar with both terms firsthand.

 

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a process that uses software to automate specific marketing tasks. This can include email marketing, social media campaigns, and targeted ads. Marketing automation can make managing large volumes of customers and leads easier and helps you target the right people with the right message. 

 

Small business marketers can use marketing automation to execute their strategy in less time and with limited resources. It is also fruitful for acquiring new clients and generating leads, but it gives the best output when you already have an established audience and a nurturing strategy.

 

What is Sales Engagement?

A series of interactions between a salesperson and a prospect throughout the sales cycle is typically known as sales engagement. Today, most of those interactions take place over the phone, via email, or on social media, as well as through ebook downloads and email click-throughs.

 

Your engagement strategy must include a sales engagement platform to gain significant insight from sales engagement data on what content, message, and distribution channels work best for generating and nurturing sales leads.

 

Every business must develop a sales engagement model, a collection of specific procedures, tactics, and multi-channel communication between the sales rep and the prospect. It helps build reliable, persisting business ties. Though creating that model takes more than one day, the results are worthwhile.

 

Related: Sales Engagement Platform: Top Tips On Using It

 

Sales Engagement and Marketing Automation – The Differences

• Marketing automation helps marketers to create Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) at the top of the sales funnel. Sales engagement gives salespeople tools to work on these leads, converting them into Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and opportunities at the bottom of the funnel. Learn about the ways to transition an MQL into an SQL

• Marketing automation involves nurturing leads to build the client base, whereas sales engagement focuses on tracking lead scores and closing deals.

• Marketing automation is designed for sending emails in bulk. Sales engagement enables sales reps to send one-to-one personalized emails.

• Marketing flow optimization is the prime responsibility of marketing automation. Making calls to fix appointments, meetings, and demos is the prime responsibility of sales engagement.

• Companies at all stages – new, growing, and old, can use marketing automation techniques, whereas using sales engagement platforms is not mandatory for new companies.

Although there are differences between marketing automation and sales engagement, at the end of the day, you need both techniques to expand your business quickly. Therefore, it’s all about coexistence and harmony. Both are critical components of the sales funnel. The right combination of these two strategies enables companies to grow faster and better.