Sales automation vs. marketing automation: Key differences

While your sales team gives their 100% effort into sales & marketing activities, manual tasks do take up a lot of time.

You need marketing and sales automation tools to improve your team’s productivity and streamline business processes.

However, you must be wondering – What is the difference between sales and marketing automation? Should businesses implement sales automation, marketing automation, or both?

This blog primarily discusses marketing automation vs sales automation. Further explains the respective meaning and benefits of both the terms.  

Bonus tip: This blog gives a fascinating insight into how a CRM tool can help you perform both sales and marketing automation to extract maximum results. 

Sales automation vs. marketing automation – Key differences you need to know

As businesses have different processes for marketing and sales, it’s equally important to automate such processes as required. For instance, the marketing team may have different requirements from the sales team.

Though both sales and marketing, automation has certain things in common. They still have some major differences as follows –

FactorsSales automationMarketing automation
Responsibility Sales automation is responsible for managing the entire sales pipeline. On the other hand, marketing automation is responsible for optimizing your marketing campaigns and automating the process of capturing and nurturing leads. 
Implementation stage Sales automation can be implemented from the growth stage of the business. Marketing automation can be implemented right from the starting stage of the business. It should be used by all businesses irrespective of their stage. 
Motive Sales automation has the primary motive for closing deals. Marketing automation has the primary motive of generating more leads.
Actions Sales automation acts majorly for tracking and closing leads. Marketing automation, on the contrary, acts for building and nurturing leads. 
Resources Sales automation uses resources in the form of CRM, emails, calls, and so on. Marketing automation uses resources in the form of CRM, social, content and etc. 

Hence, marketing and sales automation enable you to streamline both processes.

Now that you have an understanding of how sales and marketing automation differs from each other let’s understand the concept in-depth.

What is sales automation?  

Sales automation is an approach for automating each step of the sales process so your sales teams can focus more on important tasks.

Moreover, sales automation helps in better lead distribution, decreases workforce expense, improves team collaboration, and leads to better sales forecasting.

Further, you can even track your leads and team’s progress using sales pipeline CRM.

Adopting sales automation has proven to be beneficial in a variety of terms. Below are some of them as follows:

1. Cost-effective

The sales automation software offers various benefits that can save enormous costs for your business.  

For instance, sales automation automates various tedious activities; it helps in automating multiple administrative tasks and saves time in framing manual reports. This automation saves time and allows reps to focus more on revenue generation activities.

This way, by automating customer outreach, you save both time and money for your business. Moreover, there are some of the best sales automation software that starts at really affordable price.

2. Lead management

Sales automation primarily assists in managing your leads. As a sales manager, you usually spend a lot of time assigning leads to your reps and ensuring that your reps are nurturing them accordingly.

Lead management

You can automate everything with sales automation, from creating activities to assigning deals. Moreover, your sales reps will also get reminder notifications whenever a deal is assigned or for an upcoming meeting.

3. Automated communication

Your sales reps are always in touch with their prospects. They engage through various communication channels like calls, emails, texts, etc.  

Sales automation platforms can help automate customer engagements. This automates and schedules your rep’s calls, emails, and texts.

With sales cadences, you can automate emails and text messaging. Moreover, your sales reps can also put calls on auto-pilot with a power dialer.

Further, they can customize the templates and receive notifications of all the actions taken by their prospects and buyers.

4. Timely notifications

You must stay updated with your reps’ activities. Hence, most sales automation tools offer real-time notifications and reminders. 

You get to select your preference, along with who should be notified. Your reps and clients will receive email notifications for meetings, activity reminders, and notifications for chat messages.

Your sales reps can set up notifications whenever a new deal is created or if they have a meeting, never to miss any important sales opportunity. 

5. Easy reporting 

Reports are a crucial part of every sales process. They help you in measuring your monthly targets and strategizing the next steps. Hence, sales automation usually offers pre-built and unique sales reports.

Sales reports

These reports are visually appealing and, at the same time, provide actionable reviews. You can measure your conversions, deal status, and team efforts.

Further, it allows you to measure monthly and quarterly target completion.

You can even recognize the channel that’s bringing maximum sales. Moreover, you can level up your forecasting game with such clear and handy reports.   

Sales Reports lets you customize your dashboard and create critical metrics that you need. 

What is marketing automation? 

Marketing automation uses software to automate marketing activities. It manages and automates your daily marketing tasks and processes on digital marketing platforms.

Many marketing automation tools accelerate the marketing process by letting your reps switch to auto-pilot mode.

Implementing marketing automation offers great benefits. Here are some of them: 

1. Streamlined process

With the right implementation of marketing automation software, your sales reps can perform their respective task seamlessly.

They can create captivating campaigns with the right amount of personalization.

You can automate the customer journey and streamline the process. This helps eliminate manual tasks and saves time to perform productive activities.

2. Automate campaigns

Your reps spend most of their time engaging with prospects through campaigns. Marketing automation assists your reps by automating these marketing campaigns. 

Your reps will receive a notification as soon as the prospects respond and take the necessary next steps.

Moreover, they can set reminders and notifications to engage ahead. They can even track engagement with trigger-based automation.

Automation journey

Further, you can run A/B test campaigns to experiment with your strategy. Such practice can help you determine which marketing campaigns drive better results.

3. Capture more leads 

With the correct implementation of the marketing automation tool, your team can capture maximum quality leads.

Whether it’s from web forms or live chat, you can capture every detail into your CRM. Moreover, by assigning various tags to the contact that is created, you can execute automated campaigns using the best marketing automation software.

These are some of the most prominent benefits of having a marketing automation tool. Since marketing and sales automation are crucial for every growing business, I have further explained how both can be combined to create better processes.

Create enhanced processes with sales and marketing automation in Salesmate

Salesmate is a unified customer platform and CRM (Customer-relationship management) software that also offers sales and marketing automation features.

Salesmate

This software aims at building better customer relationships with its automation functionalities and robust features.

With Salesmate, your team can enhance its marketing efforts. Your marketing team can create multiple marketing campaigns, A/B test them, and personalize them to engage better with the prospects.

Salesmate’s sales automation feature enables you to generate more leads, personalize communication, manage and score leads, execute automated lead management, and derive insights from custom reports.

In addition to sales and marketing automation, Salesmate also offers these advanced features –

1. Multichannel communication with built-in calling, power dialer, text messaging, and emails
2. Capture leads using live chat, web forms, and meeting scheduler
3. Advanced workflow automation to streamline internal processes
4. Contact and lead management for a centralized database
5. Sales pipeline management to move leads quickly through the sales process
6. Enhance business process with 700+ integrations with your preferred apps

Want to see if Salesmate is the right fit for your business? Try it free for 15 days!

Conclusion

I hope this article clarifies the topic of sales automation vs marketing automation in detail.

Both have their contributions, and it’s essential to understand the role of each while creating an effective strategy. So, identify which process needs automation and then make the right choice for your business.

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