Use this pitch to sell marketing automation to your customers (even if you’re new)

How to sell marketing automation

In this blog post I’m going to outline the exact process you should follow, if you want to sell marketing automation to your customers. I’ve got the pitch, the pricing, who you should target and how to generate your first lead.

Marketing automation sounds expensive, because it is.

Going straight out the block and positioning yourself as a marketing automation expert is a great place to start. But customers are wary because it sounds like a big investment. And it is.

Arguing about ROI is useless when the customer still doesn’t really understand what marketing automation is. It doesn’t matter how smart or clever the system is, if the customer can’t imagine their life getting better with it.

Customers are hesitant to buy marketing automation and that’s because people who try to sell it, try to be too clever.

Facts don’t sell

It’s a categorical fact that the climate is changing faster than we can repair it. It’s literal fact. However, there are still billions of people who don’t believe it.

Remember 2012 when people predicted the world was going to end? The Mayans or whoever said the world would dissolve into fire. Despite being absolute nonsense, it was such a popular idea that there was a MOVIE made about it.

Facts and evidence do not sell. People don’t make choices based on fact. They make them based on story and how strong the story is to them. Imagination is 99% of the sales process and marketing automation is no different.

If you want to sell marketing automation to your customers, stop talking about marketing automation and start asking them about their fears, goals and problems. Chances are there are tons of things you can help with, you’re just trying to approach it from the wrong angle.

Easier automation than ever

There are more funnel builders entering the market than ever before. Marketing automation like all services will become easier and easier to implement. Unless you stop selling “marketing automation” and start selling desirable futures, you’re going to have a harder time competing.

How to sell marketing automation to customers

So with that, let’s talk about how to sell marketing automation to your customers.

List of people who benefit from marketing automation

In order to sell marketing automation, you need to identify people who will benefit the most from using it.

While it might seem that all businesses would benefit from marketing automation (and they would), certain types of businesses would benefit more and therefor be easier to target and sell to.

Below is a list of characteristics that I believe would benefit the most from marketing automation in their business.

  • Businesses with an email list of over 5000 people.
    If you have a large list of email subscribers or customers, marketing automation can rapidly scale the outreach to that audience. Implementing segmentation, triggers and follow up could turn a list of people into regular repeat buyers.
  • Businesses who get lots of inbound requests.
    Inbound requests can range from ready to buy, hot leads, or down to tyre kickers and time wasters. One business we worked with had at least 20 emails a day come in to their team. 50% would be freelancers asking if they were hiring. 45% would be low value but easy to deliver, 2 day projects and 5% would be high ticket ready to buy customers. It ate up a lot of time for the team to reply and manage them all, marketing automation managed to remove all that from the team so they could focus on the 5% high quality leads.
  • Businesses with one product that sells well and lots of other products that don’t sell well.
    Marketing automation can identify customers who have bought products and then continue to sell additional services and products to them, without further sales input. If you have a customer who sells lots and lots of electrical tape, a low cost but high volume product, marketing automation can introduce and sell much higher ticket products over weeks, months or even years. Massively increasing the value per customer on auto-pilot.

The pitch

Rule #1 of selling marketing funnels: Don’t talk about marketing funnels.

Rule #1 of selling marketing funnels. Or anything for that matter.

If you want to sell marketing automation to your customers, you must make it about them and not the automation.

Yes, funnels and pathways and automation is very cool and clever. But I don’t buy a car because someone tells me how it works.

Instead, we need to identify the key benefits that a customer can walk away with, when they implement marketing automation in their business. Try something like the below:

If you’ve ever felt that your business isn’t growing at the rate you want, it’s probably because you’re not selling everything you have to offer. You’re already working every hour you can, the idea of adding another 2 hours to your working day just to sell your current products sounds exhausting.

Instead, what if you were able to work fewer hours and get more of your products in front of your customers? What would you do with that time? You could spend it working on strategic partnerships. Or you could go home and pick the kids up. Maybe finally get to the gym.

Running a business is supposed to be about freedom. But if you feel like you’re just going from day to day, fighting fires and never really growing, you should talk to us about our ARC process.

ARC stands for Audit, Review, Campaign. Audit who your top customers are. Review what you’re offering and what they’ve bought. Then create a campaign to bridge the gap between their first purchase and their next.

Your customers want to hear from you and you’re doing them a disservice by not telling them about your other products that can help them and make their life easier.

Talk to us about ARC for your business and start growing, with less work, today.

With a pitch like that, notice how I helped them with the ARC process. Giving them insight into what’s wrong with their business. I also never mentioned marketing automation. I focused on what they want and made the future sound desirable.

Sell Futures, Not Features

Rule #3 of selling.

Pricing

So what should you charge for marketing automation? Well assuming that you want to deliver actual automation into their business, it needs to be at least 5 figures.

$25,000 is a good starting point to automate sales, marketing, payments, delivery, follow up and reviews with a business. You could include sales pages and a funnel within that, as well as a checkout process.

Don’t worry about traffic and start with businesses that already have a list and traffic (like we identified above). Your marketing automation is designed to look at the customers “stop list” and see where they spend the most time.

You’ll know if you can automate something to fix that, and 99% of the time, you can. Even if you can’t take the entire process over with automation, a big part of it could be done on auto-pilot.

For example, we had a customer who had two sales reps and the first half of their day was finding leads and drawing up a run sheet for their calls. They had a database of around 2000 customers and they would create reports on who to call that day.

There was no rhyme or reason to who they decided to call. Could be frequent buyers. People who have just bought. People who haven’t bought in a while. It was basically up to the sales person, and as a rule, they’d choose the easiest account they could.

My customer and I identified that the top spending customers are where the sales team should be spending their time. If they’d spoken to them within the week (sometimes 2 weeks) they should move on to customers who hadn’t bought anything in 90 days.

We built a marketing automation piece inside ActiveCampaign that would identify those segments and build a report for the sales team which would be ready to go, with contact information, sitting in their inbox.

An automation campaign would also send sales emails to previous customers who hadn’t bought in 90 days and try to sell to them. Either resulting in a call to the sales team or adding them to a list.

Best of all, the director, my customer, had a report every day of what his sales team had been working on as AC tracked it all.

Coming back to pricing, a $2000 a month package could also work, offering maintenance, updates and a new campaign every few months. Remember, it’s not about the price, it’s the future that you’re delivering to the customer and how much they want it.

Outreach

Finally, if you want to start finding these customers, get your pitch REAL tight (like the one above) and start asking your network if they know anyone who sounds like your ideal customer.

“Hey Mark, we’ve been working on a process to help directors spend less time at work and increase the average customer value. Some of our customers have even been leaving 2 hours earlier each day. We’ve found it works best with businesses that have at least 5000 email subscribers. Do you know anyone who fits that profile?”

Notice again we haven’t mentioned marketing automation. I cannot stress this enough. If you want to sell a metric fuck-ton of marketing automation – DO NOT TALK ABOUT MARKETING AUTOMATION.

The outreach email above has 3 key components.

  1. It tells them WHO you work with (rule #2) which makes it easier for them to make a connection.
  2. It focuses on a benefit and a problem. Showing that businesses owners could spend less time at work and they currently spend too much time at work.
  3. It has a little intrigue, meaning we have a new process and we’d love to show you, but doesn’t explain what it is.

Use messages like this to ask for referrals rather than telling people what you do. You’ll get leads easier than ever.

Selling marketing automation

Rule #1 – don’t talk about marketing funnels
Rule #2 – who you work with is more important than what you do
Rule #3 – sell futures not features

Identify who you want to work with and who would benefit the most from your marketing automation. Focus your pitch (and therefor your entire business copy and messaging) on the benefits that the customer will experience.

Set a price that allows you to work one on one with the customer. Set it high enough to allow margin, profit and to turn it into a valuable desirable product.

Reach out to your network, telling them who they work with, not what you do.

49 fast growth niches

If you’re still unsure on your niche, I’ve got 49 of the most desirable niches that fast growing funnel builders can target, below, for free.

Get the list sent straight to your inbox below and discover the 49 most profitable niches that marketing funnel businesses can and should target.

Mike Killen

Mike is the world's #1 sales coach for marketing funnel builders. He helps funnel builders sell marketing funnels to their customers. He is the author of From Single To Scale; How single-person, small and micro-businesses can scale their business to profit. You can find him on Twitter @mike_killen.