How to Use Salesforce With Your Conversational Marketing Strategy (Including 4 Ways to Do This Now)

A Strong Conversational Marketing Strategy is Tightly Integrated With Your CRM

A powerful CRM should already be the backbone of your marketing, let alone your conversational marketing strategy. Being able to access the right information and data at the right time is critical for your sales team’s daily interactions with prospects. The single platform that has your entire revenue team working in everyday is Salesforce, and it's a no-brainer to integrate into your conversational marketing strategy. 

The success of B2B marketing hinges on the collaboration between your core revenue teams: marketing, sales, and customer success. That’s why Salesforce acts as the foundation to it all. It's easy for your sales and customer-facing organization to store their data about existing contacts, accounts and opportunities, and for your marketing team to easily access this information to create targeted content and campaigns, and ultimately handoff leads to sales. 

Today’s buyers demand more personalized experiences and relevant content to where they are in their journey . Whether it’s through online content or even online conversations, targeting your audience in a way that resonates well with their interests and goals can amplify your marketing impact. It’s why combining Salesforce data with your live conversations on your website, leave your buyers more compelled to engage. It brings all your campaign data, engagement data, and conversation data into one place and enable your sales team to take the conversation further.

Salesforce + Conversational Marketing = Your New Superpower to Make the Marketing-to-Sales Handoff in Real-Time

Conversations have been a critical piece to the sales journey for years, and that will not change. However, the ability to open a space for 1:1 engagement at scale is pretty incredible. You can use conversational marketing as the way to engage your buyers while you’ve got their attention on a website page, a product video, or even while consuming content on your blog. You can use it to deliver tailored content or instantly respond to critical sales questions to the right people at the right time.

With the ability to use conversations across multiple channels and mediums, you are giving your buyers the control to decide where and when they want to engage with you. The ball’s in their court as they make the ultimate decision. But it is up to you and your team to make that available and ensure your content is compelling and discoverable. 

Now that technology has enabled you to scale these 1:1 conversations, it’s become a must-have tool in every marketer’s inbound tech stack.

With that said, let’s dive into how conversations fit perfectly with your CRM. Salesforce isn’t just your average run of the mill CRM in the industry. Their core advantage lies in enterprise teams, which is why a lot of CRMs on the market today don’t compete as closely. Powering your conversations with such a strong platform creates your new superpower, one that is quite important to the entire configuration. It not only syncs your existing target audience with your conversational marketing strategy, but it tracks all your conversation history, powers your conversations with significant context and nails the personalization factor. 

Connecting Salesforce to Your Conversational Marketing Platform

Now that conversational marketing technologies have emerged in the market, it’s turned into one of the most-used channels to capture all the low-hanging pipeline on your website. And your CRM, in this case Salesforce, can accelerate the impact of conversational marketing platforms. By connecting the hub of your sales activity and data in Salesforce to your conversational marketing platform, you can gage real-time intel on who is visiting your website, what they’re consuming, connect the right Salesforce owner, and initiate conversations right then and there.

Context is key for a successful, personalized conversation. Whether it comes from a simple name or their entire browsing history, it gives you that extra push you need. 

Consider these two scenarios:

1. You walk into your favorite clothing brand and are met with a sales associate looking to help you on your purchase. You go here all the time, but every time you need to explain your needs. They do their best to understand and pair you with the outfit. But, you’d rather just walk around the store on your own and do it yourself.

2. Now imagine that the sales rep actually recognized you as a regular. They understood your preferences immediately without you telling them much. They knew the type of clothing you’ve purchased before, and directed you to their latest lines that would actually be something you’d wear. Or instead, they directed you to the sales rep that’s assisted you multiple times before - almost enough that they know what you’re looking for. As the customer, you get what you need right away and there’s something like Salesforce powering the intel of the sales associate. 

Context is the key differentiator here. With a CRM, you can truly build relationships with your customers. Pick up where you may have left off the last time they were on your site. Start the conversation off with their name to make it known that you care. Plus, use their previous web activity to determine what it is they’re looking for. 

Chances are the majority of you are already using Salesforce, which makes it a perfect pair with your conversational marketing platforms. After all, you want a powerful tool like Salesforce with all your marketing and sales data to be the crux of your conversational marketing programs.

Make the Marketing-to-Sales Handoff in Real-Time

The hardest and most crucial part of connecting your CRM with your conversational marketing platform is determining when and how to make the marketing-to-sales handoff. Since sales is already leveraging Salesforce to keep track of open opportunities, existing leads and target accounts, it becomes imperative that marketing tries to engage those exact prospects in your campaigns. Once you’ve perfected this strategy, the rest flows into place. This is what creates your new superpower and will allow you to make this handoff in real time.

Think of it this way: you can now open up a channel on your website to connect sales with their buyers in real-time when they’re already engaging with you. For example, when you route an MQL over to sales that you believe is a good-fit buyer, you want them to act on it as soon as possible. Any time lapsed is time wasted, and more often than not, it pushes your prospects to other distractions, or worse, your competitors. 

Thankfully for you, this very lead could easily be converted into an SQL by connecting them to sales while they are on your website.

Here’s how your two tools can work in tandem with each other to form the ultimate superpower:

1. Target Your Accounts and Open Opportunities

   Target your top accounts and open opportunities from Salesforce to see who you want to start conversations with. Then keep a close eye for them the next time they land on your website to initiate a conversation to get the ball moving. 

2. Initiate Personalized Conversations

   Salesforce is home to all your customer data; from lead to an opportunity, it’s all there. The next time a lead lands on your site, leverage this data to deliver more personalized and targeted conversation starters. 

3. Make the Handoff Using Salesforce

   Once qualified and engaged buyers arrive on your website, you want to alert your sales team. With Salesforce, you can immediately identify the Account Owner and their existing contact information. Then you can go ahead and make the lead delivery using advanced lead routing rules so that the appropriate rep can jump on to start the conversation right that moment.  

4. Track Conversations and Reporting in Salesforce

   As mentioned previously, a unilateral sync between sales and marketing is crucial for this strategy to be successful. Through a strong integration with Salesforce, you can track and log your conversations in Salesforce at the lead level and view insights into your leads, pipeline and revenue. It's one less login required. 

Conversational marketing is extremely versatile when implemented the right way. Adding Salesforce into the mix will only amplify its potential for you and your team to deliver more qualified, engaged buyers to sales. Your sales team already loves the platform, and much of the legwork is already being done right within it already. So why not take the next step and integrate the two to create a powerful strategy to accelerate your pipeline and revenue. 

Insent is a human-first B2B chat platform that integrates deeply with Salesforce so you can convert your most engaged prospects in real-time.