If you're a typical business owner, you have one or more of these problems:

1. You're spending lots of money on marketing but have no idea what's working and what isn't.
2. You feel like you're throwing stuff against the wall and hoping something works.
3. Your sales and marketing teams are at each other's throats. Sales says they don't get good qualified leads, and Marketing says they send Sales lots of leads that aren't followed up on properly.
4. You don't know the ROI of your marketing campaigns.
5. You don't have an effective sales funnel to help qualify leads.
6. You don't have a clear marketing strategy or, even if you do, it's not reflected through your website so the website isn't helping qualify and sell.
7. Your customer base isn't segmented for direct communications based on interests and behavior.

If you honestly don't have any of the 7 problems above, Congratulations! Your business is bound to be rocking and rolling and sales are skyrocketing.

But if you're one of the vast majority of small businesses, you have anywhere from several to all of the problems. Don't despair, though!

Every one of these problems is not only fixable, but can be fixed in a way that helps you get more and - more importantly - BETTER clients.

You can have a marketing and sales process in which all pieces work together like a well-oiled machine.

With marketing automation, you can expect benefits like these:

• By the time your sales team is in contact with a prospect, they'll have pre-qualified themselves through self-selecting funnels on your website and should be at a stage ready to close.
• Marketing will use live data to know which of their campaigns are working so they can quickly make adjustments. The net result is that you'll concentrate your resources on what works and ditch what doesn't. Sales should go up and expenses down.
• Sales and Marketing will work together as a team because they're both getting what they want and need – or if they aren't, it will be easier to figure out why and fix it.
• You'll be able to track the ROI on individual marketing campaigns.
• You'll be able to track opportunities in the pipeline to help forecast future revenues, helping with operational and cashflow planning.
• Your communications with prospects and existing customers will be highly targeted based on their actual behavior and interests – rather than blasting the same message at everyone.