Blog originally published Sep 4, 2018.

Having a healthy stream of leads coming in from your website is a great first step toward generating revenue attributable to your marketing efforts. But turning those leads into customers requires a bit more strategic attention.

Lead scoring is a valuable tool that any sales and marketing team can implement to close more customers. Lead scoring is a system that ranks your prospects based on their perceived value to your organization. It is an automated way to identify and hand off your hottest leads to your sales team so they can work their magic and close more deals.

A new prospect hits your website. Their company is a perfect fit for your services, and you quickly reach out to make contact, but alas! The prospect is not yet ready to buy. This is the scenario facing companies and sales teams of all sizes, who find themselves with a pile of qualified leads who aren’t quite ready to make a purchase. Lead nurturing is the perfect tactic to engage this group of prospective customers until they’re ready to make a purchasing decision. 

A lead nurturing campaign typically consists of a series of automated emails specifically designed to keep leads engaged with your company, nurturing them along their buying journey to becoming a customer. Orchestrated properly, lead nurturing establishes trust with your leads, positions your organization as a bona fide expert in your space, leads to warmer sales conversations, and, most importantly, closes more deals. 

Marketing automation adoption continues to grow among marketers in 2020, with most marketing teams now using at least one automation tool as part of their tech stack.

Building a smart marketing automation strategy is a great way to generate remarkable marketing results and revenue growth in 2020. Like most things in digital marketing, being strategic and thoughtful in your approach to marketing automation is the best way to proceed. A sloppy or on-the-fly approach without a thoughtful, buttoned-up strategy is almost certain to create headaches and hurdles down the road. And it certainly won’t be scalable.

Setting yourself up for success within HubSpot is a critical process. HubSpot contains a powerful set of tools to help increase lead generation and customer acquisition, but it's not a magic button that is ready to go from the gate. You need to properly configure your system to make it work well for your organization, and that starts with properly mapping your sales process using lifecycle stages, lead statuses, and deal stages.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. Your team has recently implemented a marketing automation solution, but six months in or even a year later, you're still not experiencing substantial gains in efficiency, lead generation, and revenue growth. You're probably feeling a little shortchanged, and with good reason.

If you're in this situation, don't panic. You don't have to settle for mediocre results. Game-changing technology like marketing automation should deliver game-changing results. 

Start by identifying the root cause of your lackluster results. Once you know what you're dealing with, there are steps you can take to quickly turn things around and start capitalizing on your marketing automation investment. 

The world’s most popular marketing automation platform, HubSpot, is primarily known for its ability to help marketing teams, but there are so many powerful facets of the software that are designed to supercharge sales for your company.

Many sales leaders are cautiously optimistic about marketing automation software like HubSpot, but they're just not sure how the technology applies to them. 

HubSpot includes a full set of sales productivity tools that help streamline and speed up your sales process. These technology tools allow sales teams to spend more time selling, shortening average sales cycles and increasing sales team happiness. Let’s take a look at some of the top tools helping sales teams fuel performance.

Marketing automation exists primarily to help companies generate revenue. Because, really, what's the point of marketing if it's not generating revenue? The way we see it, marketing shouldn't even be happening at your company if it's not strategically generating revenue in a predictable and scalable way.

When it comes to segmentation, many companies lean on the basics, splitting up their email database by industry, persona, and/or stage of the funnel. But why stop there?

Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot make it easy to create lists based on actions and engagements taken by your website visitors. When you augment this data with offline touch points logged in your CRM, there are an endless number of trigger combinations you can use to segment your audience and deliver highly-customized marketing and sales campaigns.

Automated email campaigns, also known as nurture campaigns, are a powerful way to accelerate revenue growth across your entire marketing and sales funnel.

Nurture campaigns are a wise investment because they can usually be built using assets you already have, and they require fairly low maintenance to maintain and optimize post-launch. These campaigns work hard for you in the background, freeing up your sales and marketing teams to work on higher-priority opportunities or more strategic initiatives.

A nurture campaign is made up of a series of automated email messages that are sent to a specific audience according to a pre-established schedule. You can design these automated email campaigns to generate growth in a variety of ways, for both sales and marketing teams. These campaigns are easily built with marketing automation software.

Explore six automated email campaigns that accelerate growth across the entire funnel, from warming up marketing-qualified leads to getting a second chance with deals you've lost.

Marketing automation software offers enormous benefits to marketing and sales teams, but it's not a magic wand. To be successful, you need to have the right tool in place to support your team's needs and goals.

When your team is stuck using a marketing automation solution that isn't a good fit, you fail to see results, and your team gets frustrated. Who can blame them? Left without a good marketing automation tool, they're at a crippling disadvantage, and their competitors have an easy edge.

Read on to learn three common signs you're using the wrong marketing automation software, and learn how to find a better solution for your organization.