The B2B market is ever-changing, so sales teams need to be agile. Marketing automation software can help your business discover untapped opportunities through data analysis, streamline sales operations, and scale your outreach.

Simply, marketing automation software can help your sales team be more efficient and effective in attracting potential customers. High-performing teams combine such tools with AI-powered email, to move faster and collaborate more effectively.

1. HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot offers a comprehensive suite of tools to support marketing and sales. Everything from email campaign management, to CRM, scoring leads, managing social media, content management, and analytics. 

HubSpot offers four membership tiers, with a free option. And is suitable for smaller teams all the way up to enterprise. 

2. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Salesforce is a powerful ecosystem that offers B2B marketing automation for medium to large businesses with a lot to manage. Their Einstein feature analyzes everything from leads to trends to give you quick insights at a glance. Their emphasis on AI offers a dynamic customer journey, referral programs, and cross-channel analytics.

3. Adobe Marketo Engage

Adobe Marketo Engage is a great choice for medium-sized businesses with advanced requirements. Adobe offers four tiers, and Marketo Engage allows you to really dive deep into the customer journey with a timeline system that is easy to arrange.

4. Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation

Oracle Eloqua is most suitable for large companies that require customization and advanced segmentation capabilities. It can be a one-stop shop for sales and marketing, with design editors, lead management, targeting, and campaign orchestration.

5. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign lets you deliver a highly customized experience to your customers. You can set up pricing tiers, and offer products in freemium and free trial experiences. And you can set up automated campaigns to cross-sell and up-sell, based on customer behavior and purchase history. 

What are the main challenges of B2B sales?

Business-to-business sales can be complicated and challenging. Acquiring and retaining customers takes continual, evolving effort and focus.

Common B2B sales challenges include:

Long sales cycles

In B2B, sales decisions often involve multiple people, with extensive negotiations, research, and product testing. Sales teams need to maintain deal momentum through effective collaboration and following up.

Find out why elite sales teams like UserGems' trust Superhuman to shorten deal cycles and generate more revenue.

Highly competitive

B2B sales are often highly competitive, with several companies offering similar services or products. If your company can offer a stronger value proposition, a different approach, and show innovation, you stand a better chance.

Generating leads

For some businesses generating leads is extremely difficult and time-consuming. The more niche a market, the harder it can be to find qualified leads. Spending time on low-quality prospects can be a waste of time and effort for everyone.

Sales prospecting tools can help sales teams scale efficiency and productivity by streamlining the process of finding and securing leads.

Uniting sales and marketing

Getting sales and marketing teams on the same page can be a challenge, but most business leaders recognize the benefits of aligning department goals and strategies. 

Retention

Retaining clients is imperative to maintaining a healthy business and a motivated sales team. Customers need to be properly cared for and catered to, by all departments from product development, to marketing, to customer service, to sales. 

What can marketing automation software tools do?

Here's a summary of typical marketing automation software benefits:

Email marketing

Automated email marketing can be a powerful way to interact with your audience and potential clients. AI can help you identify leads that have interacted with your campaigns and foster their level of interest with more personalized email content.

Lead management

Once leads are collected, AI is used to help get insights on leads, score them, and keep you organized. AI can generate information about an individual and their company by providing detailed information, with links, at a glance. This information is highly accurate, generated quickly, and can be invaluable to your sales and marketing teams.

CRM integration

Integrating between systems removes the extra step of entering the same information in two places. With CRM integration, you can avoid any potential missteps or miscommunications between people and systems by keeping everything centralized.

Analytics

Analytics can help your team identify trends and opportunities, and spot potential errors. AI can break down large sets of data and quickly digest them into reports that you can take action on.

Customer journey

Understanding and optimizing the B2B customer journey is a delicate process that automation can also assist with. AI has the ability to analyze market conditions, generate proposals, and analyze product usage — all of which gives you the insight and power to upsell.

Free up even more time

Superhuman is a blazingly fast email experience that saves teams over 10 million hours every year. 

Eliminate email anxiety and fly through your inbox twice as fast with AI-powered email.