The path to business success comes down to who can build a relationship with the client based on a strong foundation of trust. Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is fully designed to help get to know your clients, understand their requirements, show your appreciation for them, get feedback, have regular communication with them, and ultimately  deliver value to meet their expectations. 

By automating all the repetitive processes where no human touch is required, sales and marketing teams can get more involved in bringing in new customers and making more sales, instead of spending routine time on manual drudgery. All this is done while saving teams’ time and boosting customers’ happiness, and of course, increasing revenue.

But out of all the tools available in the market, Salesforce users must be wondering which marketing automation and lead nurturing tools will help them the most.

Here we’ll focus on B2B tools which include triggers and workflows that streamline repetitive sales and marketing tasks so companies can nurture, warm and ready leads for sale. Also on those that will encourage one-up purchases to become a lifelong relationship with the customer. 

Ways to use B2B Marketing Automation for effective Results: 

The following ways will make significant first steps in case you are thinking about where to start with B2B automation.

1. Automating Follow-ups

Use page-based triggers to automate follow-up for the key behaviors that lead engages in before their purchases like visiting the price page, signing up for some content, or involving in live chatting. This follow-up could be sending an email with educational content or FAQ that will perfectly nurture the lead. 

2. Lead Nurturing

Sending your clients educational information like a newsletter or email to showcase that you are one of the thoughtful companies in the industry is referred to as lead nurturing.  It helps in building trust and educating the client before purchase which is especially required in B2B. 

3. Segmentation

Divide the leads into various segments based on their activities, location, level of engagement, and other shared characteristics. Automation can be done to segregate the leads using workflows. This will help you cater to them differently and decide on the type and level of nurturing required for each group. 

4. Lead Qualification

Every company has its way to say to lead as a qualified lead based on parameters they set. Automation can be made to send leads to qualified leads, send them different emails and inform the sales team to have a follow-up. 

5. Lead Scoring

Lead scoring refers to the stage of the lead in the buyer's journey. Based on the lead’s engagement they can be scored. This process can be automated in which leads are scored whenever they show more interest. 

6. Data Collection

One of the tedious tasks involved in companies importing and sorting data to CRM can be automated. This helps sales reps utilize time in more efficient tasks like talking to clients and converting leads.

7. Form Automation

Once the customer or lead fills out a form, be it for sign-up or customer services it can be automated to reach the desired rep of the company.  

8. Automation for Social Media

Automation can be used to post or broadcast on various social media sites for publicity or other needs. 

9. Chatbots

This can help direct queries to a live chat for better customer support services. 

10. Automation to remove Cold Leads

Cold leads should not be kept in the database for long as otherwise, they will be wasting resources. Automating the process of removing cold leads will help in saving resources and optimize the org.  Further, this will lead to enhancement in lead intake, upsurge in conversions, improve customer experience, reduce money spent on marketing and campaigning, and many more.

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• Where to use Automation for Marketing and Lead Nurturing
• Automating Follow-ups
• Lead Nurturing
• Segmentation
• Lead Qualification
• Lead Scoring
• Data Collection
• Form Automation
• Automation for Social Media
• Chatbots
• Automation to remove cold leads

These points will be beneficial to a great extent for a business when clubbed with practices like identifying your targets and understanding their behaviors very well, alleging sales and market time, mapping sales cycles, and then creating automation, leveraging on reports to analyze and try to improve using those analyses.   

Now that we are convinced with marketing automation, the question arises of which tools to be used to accomplish automation. As the market is filled with various tools varying in terms of price and features. But one needs to think about what suits them best, is easy to use, and provides timely content for marketing. Salesforce provides lots of options that one can explore and select that suit them the most. 

Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing tools
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Tool 1. Pardot

Powered by AI and built with the world's most intelligent CRM (Salesforce), its number one B2B marketing automation solution for companies with sales and marketing teams which helps them convert deals faster. It aligns marketing and sales teams who can track prospects, conversions, and campaign activities on one dashboard so that marketing teams can connect to high-quality leads and nurture them until they are sales-ready. 

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• How Pardot can help:
• Personalizing the customer journey based on prospect engagement.
• Tracking campaign performance with a complete view of the buyer's journey across marketing and sales.  
• Providing templates to beautify and personalize emails.
• Creating customized lead-capturing forms.
• Features like progressive profiling help in building prospects’ data over time.
• Engagement history is captured on each prospect’s record which helps the sales team with the information they need to interact with the prospect. This helps the sales reps in having the right conversation with the right lead at the right time from anywhere. 
• Scoring and grading the leads as per the company’s set characteristics.
• Compiling real-time analytics to track revenue and ROI. 
• Displaying a view of the marketing lifecycle, so it helps the company detect what is working and what needs to be optimized.  

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Tool 2. Hubspot

Hubspot can be easily synced with Salesforce. It provides a set of powerful marketing automation tools to help your business attract and convert customers across multiple touchpoints without shuttling from one solution to another. 

• How Hubspot can help:
• Its Ad management and retargeting tool helps in creating personalized ads that attract the right audience for your business. 
• Given that Hubspot is connected to the contacts database, it can help in campaigning based on lead segregation that targets visitors at different stages of their journey leading to more helpful customer experiences and better returns. 
• Using Hubspot’s forms and landing pages, sales or marketing teams can easily convert new traffic into high-quality business leads. These professional-looking pages can be easily used without any expert developer or designer needed.  They are available as templates or can be designed using drag-n-drop features. 
• Its email tool helps in providing a high-touch customer experience by using email templates provided in its template library or building brand emails from scratch with its drag-n-drop editor. 
• One can leverage its email performance analyzer to improve deliverability and customer engagement.  
• It provides pre-built reports and custom dashboards. These can be used to track performances easily across all core marketing efforts, in one centralized view, confidently allocating the company's budget and priorities for the tactics that drive the most impact.    

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Tool 3. SalesGenie

SalesGenie is a hyper-scale real-time data platform that can help enterprises deliver improved experiences to their customers. It provides an unprecedented level of personalization. 

• How SalesGenie can help:
• It helps sales and marketing people harmonize all data which helps them in engaging customers and have a greater chance of closing a big deal. It provides real-time data so that there can be real-time communication. 
• The lead nurturing process can be easily automated to have a streamlined way of communication with the lead and a high level of contact can be created. 
• Features like Workflow Designer can help in creating multi-step campaigns to facilitate marketing teams. This can help create campaigns in no time.
• By providing a constant eye on the interactions of the customer, companies need not wait for the prospect to get converted to a qualifier. With SalesGenie one can directly convert prospects to sales in real-time. 
• It helps u treat the customer with a more personalized touch. In other words, these profiles will help you create magical experiences for your customers in critical moments when milliseconds matter most.

Tool 4. Marketo

Marketo develops and sells marketing automation software for account-based marketing and other marketing services and products including SEO and other content creation.

• How Marketo can help:
• Marketo provides huge comprehensive tools for social marketing that can be used to set up and manage contents, referral campaigns, and other social media activities to track old and bring new audiences.  
• It provides drag-n-drop functionality to create attractive email templates or campaigns. Along with this, there is a scheduling feature so that one can plan and implement campaigns well in advance.  
• It helps in nurturing leads based on their engagement, interest in the product, and actions. It helps in automating follow-ups based on the way customers behave.  This can be used to send alerts to sales when a customer shows interest in buying. 
• It helps you see the sources from where leads are coming. Based on the source one can analyze their further campaigning strategies.
• It provides great landing pages and forms. They can be used from the templates provided or designed using simple drag-n-drop features. 

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Tool 5. Marketing Cloud - former ExactTarget 

ExactTarget is a well-known company for providing B2B automatic digital communication solutions with the vision to deliver proper messages to the right person at the right movement. 

• How Marketing Cloud can help:
• It provides a single management console for all types of digital communicable channels like voice, SMS, email, etc. This helps the company have one stop for all types of communication. 
• They provide flexibility in terms of scalability. So companies can process high-sensitive emails and get them automatically delivered, no matter how many transactions are needed per day. Also, they provide a reliable data center that is capable of storing huge data safely and securely.
• It helps in providing insight into social conversation. Companies can use this to have personalized content for the targeted audience so that they can have distinguishable results from the competitors. 

Some of the other B2B marketing automation and lead nurturing Salesforce tools are SilverPop, CallidusCloud, and MailChimp. You can figure out which one to use based on your requirements. 

Hope this article gives you insight to top Salesforce tools for B2B Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing. Wishing you all the best in your business.