January 25 - 2023

Using Automation in the Agricultural Sales Process

Did you know that almost 53% of B2B companies and agricultural businesses use marketing automation? And about 50% of B2B marketing professionals have already implemented sales and marketing automation for their business. Are you one of them?

Agricultural businesses and B2B companies are under pressure to enhance plant productivity, increase competitiveness, and meet their customer demands for innovation.

Buyers now prefer using B2B e-commerce solutions instead of email or conventional procurement workflows. However, keep in mind that creating an online version of your industrial or B2B catalog is not enough. This is because many B2B buyers are demanding automation fueled by integration with their ERP, eProcurement, CRM, and inventory systems.

What is B2B Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is an excellent way to take agricultural businesses and sales tasks and activities that otherwise would have to be handled manually and automate these tasks using digital tools and software.

B2B marketing automation is important as it allows you to streamline and optimize marketing tasks and role responsibilities via workflows and triggers. B2B automation will help your team stay efficient and productive while nurturing your leads.

How Marketing Automation Helps B2B Companies

B2B companies and agricultural businesses can improve agriculture efficiency and revenue growth by using automation.

Improve Internal Processes

Agricultural companies usually have complicated business processes. However, marketing automation can drive productivity and efficiencies. It also allows for real-time routing, and task creation, making follow-up across channels and functions possible.

Automation can Streamline Procurement

Many B2B companies and sellers don’t offer e-commerce options to their customers. Did you know that 80% of B2B agriculture companies and distributors process their orders by hand?

However, most buyers use ERP and procurement software. This is why the sales process is usually a complicated dance involving plenty of manual data entry as well as back-and-forth document exchanges.

However, streamlining your purchasing process by implementing and leveraging automated procurement will help save your company money and time by making your B2B purchasing team more data-driven, efficient, and productive.

How to Use B2B Marketing Automation

Marketing automation in the industrial sector works by aligning your marketing efforts and initiatives with sales in order to drive value.

Adequately integrated with effective and engaging content marketing efforts, automation of your marketing processes means higher quality leads for sales, increased revenue, and reduced costs.

Marketing Automation for Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing involves cultivating relationships with your potential buyers and customers at every stage of the sales process. On average, about 50% of the leads in most systems are not yet ready to purchase.

Marketing automation allows B2B agriculture companies to develop lead nurturing campaigns. They are also called email drip campaigns and help buyers gradually move from awareness to consideration to decision.

Understand Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are important as they help B2B marketers create ideal strategies and specific campaigns in order to drive leads through the buyer’s journey. Remember that agriculture might have many different buyer personas. As a result, you must remember that even with B2B sales, you are selling to a person.

This means that you have to personalize your campaign in order to target different B2B buyers within your industry, and marketing automation will help you track engagement to define buyer personas.

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