Marketing automation is rapidly becoming a necessity for B2B sales organizations. Because it keeps the conversation going long after the initial lead is captured, automation creates robust opportunities to engage prospects and promote continued awareness of your solutions.
Some of the biggest benefits you’ll reap from automating your marketing efforts include:
- Understanding buyers through their behaviors.
- Tracking the sincerity of buyer intent.
- Turning conversations into revenue.
Not only can marketing automation’s built-in perks help marketers in numerous ways, they can be further enhanced when you add a value calculator to the mix. Value calculators won’t only help you collect more data, but they’ll help leads continue to move down the funnel.
Collecting More Data
The benefits of automation are further enhanced when integrated with the value calculators embedded on your website. As data is captured in the calculators, marketing gains important insights into prospect needs and concerns. This allows more focused automated communications and more effective marketing campaigns.
Sales also benefits from this data by using it to understand prospect pain points, identify the most appropriate solutions, and create an ROI business case to accelerate purchasing decisions. They gain access to information entered into the value calculator (e.g., industry, revenue, number of employees, and business challenges) before even engaging with the buyer. What’s more, this data can also be used to analyze win/loss by net value, optimize pricing, identify target markets, and prioritize new product features.
Moving Buyers Down the Funnel
In addition to the data both sales and marketing benefit from, these calculators can also help keep buyers moving down the funnel.
From Prospects to Leads
During the very early stages of the buying process, prospects might not yet be convinced solving their problem is urgent. Value calculators turn prospects into leads by showing them how much money they’re spending unnecessarily or leaving on the table each month. This also helps you establish the value they’ll obtain by solving their problem.
A Justification to Buy
Leads that are in the top of the funnel likely realize they have a problem and are seeking solutions. The value calculator can be promoted as an asset to move those leads to the middle of the funnel by helping them quantify the size of their problem and the value of solving it using a given solution. Leads that complete this step are more sales ready and may stop looking for other solutions once they see a path forward.
Not Hung Up on Price
Another benefit of leveraging a value calculator throughout the buying process is that it helps you avoid a price discussion until you’ve clearly defined the prospect’s problem and how your solution can add value.
Essentially, value calculators act as self-serve tools that prospects can use to estimate how much the problem is actually costing them and how much they can increase sales and/or reduce costs. Once they know how much money they’re losing, they’ll be less hung up on price when that conversation comes to the fore.
Conclusion
Together, marketing automation and value selling tools make life easier for both your sales and marketing teams.
Not only will all prospect activity be tracked, armed with the additional data and hard numbers provided directly by prospects via these calculators, your teams will know exactly what each individual prospect needs before engaging them in conversation. Consequently, your prospects will be pleased with the tailored information they receive, increasing the likelihood they convert into customers more quickly!
Last but not least, value calculators can also help marketers avoid common hang ups that occur throughout the buying process and move leads down the funnel with ease.
