Marketing automation has quickly risen in importance for businesses across all sectors. Surveys indicate that nearly half of all companies have adopted the technology, and that number runs even higher for B2B businesses. 91% of marketers also agree that marketing automation is “very important” for their success across different marketing channels.

Advancements in technology have provided businesses the opportunity to dramatically improve the efficiency and productivity of their marketing and sales organizations. Marketing automation software helps marketing teams design and execute marketing campaigns that attract and nurture more qualified leads with fewer resources. CRM software helps salespeople manage their day-to-day sales activities; enables an efficient sales process that accelerates leads through the sales funnel; and gives management improved visibility into the pipeline and more accurate forecasting. 

Email is still an efficient method of communicating with your prospects and customers. Its efficiency can be significantly enhanced, however, if it’s automated. Today’s marketing automation software allows you to eliminate time-consuming tasks of writing and sending emails. Not only will automating emails improve your team’s productivity, it will also eliminate the chance of sending poorly-written emails composed by individual team members.  Wouldn’t it be great to have the confidence that a prospect would never again receive an email message with spelling or grammatical errors or with messaging outside the corporate brand parameters?

I spoke with a business owner recently who expressed his frustration with marketing automation software. I’ll call him “Joe” to protect his identity. Joe had purchased a well-known marketing automation tool last year with the hopes of improving his lead generation, building his pipeline, and growing his revenue. Joe runs a small manufacturing firm and he doesn’t have a lot of marketing resources. In fact, he is the marketing department. But that’s just one of the hats he wears. Joe is also the CEO and the sales rep.

Marketing automation software is created to make our lives as marketers easier and more effective—though sometimes the plethora of tools can be a little overwhelming and we might even forget to use some along the way. I’m here today to remind you of the small but mighty tracking URL. Let’s dive in with some Q&A:

What is a tracking URL?

A tracking URL is a normal URL that has a “token” associated with it (on the end of the URL). It allows traffic driven to a page or website to be properly sourced depending on the individual place(s) you used it. When used with a marketing automation platform, like HubSpot for example, it will be seen in your Sources Report where it separates the different traffic from each URL.

Each year at budget time, most B2B companies face a similar challenge. How do we increase our revenue from the prior year? For many, the simple answer is hiring more salespeople. After all, if our average salesperson makes $100,000 and they are selling $1,000,000 worth of business, you can easily increase your sales by hiring 2 or 3 more salespeople. The bottom line expense would be $200-$300k for salaries, but the increase in sales would be $1,800,000-$1,900,000. Of course, you also need to factor in your management span and the possibility of needing additional sales managers to account for the increased size of your sales team. Also factor in sales training and other overhead that a growing sales team needs to be effective.

On paper, increasing the size of your sales team each year is a great strategy for increasing sales on an annual basis. However, at some point, it gets very expensive to carry the overhead and expense of a well-paid sales team, and at some point there will be diminishing returns as most markets are only so big.  

One of the things I remember most about my grandfather was his reminiscing about growing up without television and telling me about how lucky we are to have the technology that we have. Now that I have gotten older, I have started to tell stories to my kids and younger adults that start with “remember when?” and “when I was growing up. . . ."

My favorite story is about when I was in college at George Mason University, sitting in the computer lab till the wee hours of the morning and working on the mainframe to run some basic programs to play online role playing games with my fraternity brothers. We would stay up all night playing these games (which was really just typing back and forth to each other but it was cutting edge technology in 1995). It was truly the beginning of the Internet (thanks Al Gore). Back then, fax machines were still used regularly, and you would get an AOL CD in the mail almost every other day. In 2016, things are a little different and we can do so much more with technology than in previous generations. But we must be wary of all of that power, or we can end up being like those scary clowns terrorizing our neighborhoods this Halloween.

A few years ago at HubSpot’s Inbound 2013, one of the keynote speakers was Arianna Huffington. The insight she shared was valuable and has stuck with me ever since. During her 47 minute keynote, she didn’t directly talk about inbound marketing and lead generation. No, in order to connect and understand what she was talking about, you have to understand the greatest benefit of inbound marketing: it works while you are sleeping.

Arianna Huffington has become one of the most outspoken proponents of getting enough sleep and how leaders are more effective when they are better rested and not sleep deprived. A quick search on sleep and leadership provides us a look at how important sleep is for leaders and for salespeople and how better we function after a good night’s sleep or a nap.

Over the past 4 years as an Inbound Marketing and Sales Consultant at LeadG2, I’ve been asked a lot of questions by clients about where to find things in the HubSpot software tool. HubSpot is a wonderful tool, but like many “all-in-one” marketing or sales products, it takes some time to learn where everything is and hours of hands-on application to become an expert. These are the easiest questions to answer, but these are not my favorite questions to answer.  

My favorite questions to answer have one thing in common: They always start with “I was wondering if there was a way to…?” The answers to these questions are usually not something easily found in the support documentation, a Google search, or the HubSpot forum. No, these are questions that involve complex thinking and an in-depth understanding of both HubSpot and the client’s business processes and business needs. 

This past weekend, I received some really bad news: my 2006 Jeep needed a new alternator and radiator. This past weekend I received some really bad news: my 2006 Jeep needed a new alternator and radiator. With 120,000+ miles on the odometer, that was to be expected, and I figured it was something that needed to be done. As someone who likes to work on cars and other mechanical things, I told myself that it was probably something I could do myself. After all, I have a pretty nice set of socket wrenches, screwdrivers, and a few other tools in my garage. How hard could it be? But I found out quickly that it wasn't as simple as it seemed—because I didn't have the tools for the job.

Just as I initially thought that I had the right tools to change my own alternator and radiator, many marketers and sales managers believe they have the right tools and marketing strategies for generating leads and obtaining new customers. Often, these tools are no more than a large team of salespeople that, by brute force, prospect and generate new leads using sales tools from 1990 such as cold calling, fish bowls, mass direct mail, and untargeted ads. If this sounds like your sales team or organization, it might be time to upgrade your lead generation toolbox with some new tools. Trust me, it’s much easier to accomplish any task when you have the right tools.