TLDR: Marketo Sales Insight provides easy access to deep intelligence that helps sales close deals, but the value is only apparent when sales and marketing work well together.
Why collaboration matters: If your marketing and sales teams don’t collaborate closely with each other, it’s likely that sales underestimates just how much marketing’s data and technical knowledge can help them perform.
Hidden features, big impact: For the various ways that Salesforce and Marketo integrate, there’s one particular feature of Marketo that can set sales up to succeed but siloed work environments often cause it to fly under the radar.
What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain to sales the value of Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) and how sales and marketing teams need to work together to get the best from it. You’ll learn how to:
➡️ Lift up sales
➡️ Demonstrate credibility
➡️ Influence a greater appreciation from sales towards the value of marketing’s work.
What is Marketo Sales Insight?
Marketo Sales Insight (sometimes called Sales Insight Marketo) is an application that runs directly in your CRM. It effectively gives sales a direct portal to marketing’s analytics, with a range of features that allow sales to better understand how leads and prospects respond to campaigns and engage with your brand.
Among the capabilities that Marketo Sales Insights has, there are a couple to call out that really drive home the benefits.
- Best Bets: Best Bets provides an at-a-glance ranking of leads scored by recency—the most powerful indicator for propensity to buy. Sales can use this to prioritize the best leads and strike while the iron is hot.
- Interesting moments: Reps can then see an activity history for each lead. The history includes a set of interesting moments defined by marketing —engagements like form fills, webinar attendance, and links clicked.
- Personalized outreach: Based on this information, sales can personalize their outreach with knowledge of each lead’s interests and needs.
Marketo Sales Insight provides easy access to a depth of intelligence.
Marketo Sales Insight provides easy access to a depth of intelligence.
Using it regularly can make sales more productive and enhance their ability to close deals. But, as with all tools, the benefits don’t reap themselves.
Before you get started with MSI, it’s important to address any structural issues that have prevented your teams from already using it.
Partners in growth
The value of MSI is clear as day in the parts of your business where sales and marketing work as a well-oiled machine. That means:
- the integration between Marketo and your CRM is set up
- marketing punctually updates Marketo Sales Insight with the latest campaign response data, and
- sales then uses it to have timely and engaging conversations with leads.
The reality often differs. Marketo Sales Insight is notably underused for a default Marketo app, partially due to confusion around licensing.
Teams often mistake Marketo Sales Insights for a Salesforce plugin that renders marketing emails in Outlook.
A useful point to clarify for sales: unlike this plugin, MSI doesn’t require a separate license from Marketo (and extra expense) to use.
The organizations that use MSI do so to varying degrees of competency, which brings up a deeper problem.
Here are a few examples of the powerful capabilities in MSI that are lost on teams that lack the maturity to execute them:
- comprehensive lead scoring
- prioritization models
- buyer activity tracking, and
- customer engagement monitoring.
Get your house in order
If your marketing and sales teams work in a siloed environment without the mechanisms or appetite to share data and knowledge with each other, then using MSI is only viable if your teams treat it as the foundation on which to build a collaborative relationship.
The key to getting sales on side is to make sure your house is in order.
Marketing should be properly set up to capture and report on customer behavior across your website, email, and other online channels.
Marketing must also be prepared to define elements in MSI like nurture program reporting and Interesting Moments from each customer’s engagement history.
Frame Marketo Sales Insight to Sales as a partnership that helps their performance.
If you have that figured out, frame Marketo Sales Insight to Sales as an opportunity to create a partnership that helps their performance.
Offer to train sales on MSI, and you’ll encourage them to consider how marketing’s efforts, and collaboration with marketing, ultimately aid the pursuit of growth.
The takeaway
In summary, MSI makes your sales team’s lives considerably easier. It allows them to:
- prioritize the most urgent leads
- drill down into their historical interactions with your brand
- build compelling stories that produce more effective outreach communications, and
- save time otherwise spent digging through tools or waiting for reports to get the most vital information.
That said, MSI demands that teams resolve their maturity issues.
For one, marketing’s data collection and reporting should be robust enough to feed sales with the most useful information. Both teams should prepare to overcome friction and work together, which, for sales, means being receptive to marketing’s guidance towards interpreting the numbers.
When that agreement’s in place, Marketing Sales Insight helps both sides of your revenue operation to perform.
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