According to a recent study, most sales teams still spend around 50% of their time on sales tasks that can be automated. They continuously work in the same cycle of understanding the needs of the customer, jotting down significant notes, entering data, and following up. They connect with multiple prospects via endless meetings, phone calls, and emails. All these tasks end up becoming time-consuming when handled manually.
On the other hand, 80% of business leaders are looking into sales automation solutions because they realize how important it is for them to automate and streamline their sales management processes.
In this blog post, you will see how sales automation works and how you can start automating your sales process today!
What Is Sales Automation?
Sales automation helps to automate sales processes and many manual tasks carried out by the salespeople using sales automation software, artificial intelligence, and digital tools.
It shifts the focus of your sales team from manual and time-consuming tasks that include follow-ups, pipeline updates, training, to other high-value activities like building relationships and nurturing leads.
Sales reps can leverage powerful tools and execute automated email campaigns and follow-up emails, segment and assign leads, generate visual sales pipelines, etc., and help drive revenues.
Why Do We Need Sales Automation?
Sales automation software considers the needs of your business and provides you with the following benefits:
- Enhances The Efficiency, Performance, And Productivity Of The Sales Team- When you utilize sales automation tools in your business, it eliminates the burden of recurring tasks from your sales team. It increases their productivity and improves the performance to a greater level, thereby optimizing the way of closing the deals.
- Saves Time- Automating sales processes removes the task that has been done manually and consumes a lot of time and effort.
- Maintains Relationship With Customers- Sales team has to perform multiple redundant sales activities that prove to be essential while interacting with the customers or prospects. These activities help them in building and maintaining relationships with the customers. However, doing it manually becomes relatively challenging for them. When you automate these sales activities, you make the work easier for your team by minimizing the burden.
- Simplifies The Reporting Process- Report handling is relatively a lengthy process. But, after automating your sales process, you can directly send your report to the managers using CRMs. It removes the need of creating a report individually.
- Increases Data Consistency- You need to have consistent sales data to eliminate discrepancies. Furthermore, you also have to fix the errors detected in the data physically. But, when you automate your sales process, it reduces the chance of error and increases data consistency.
- Increases Accuracy- With the help of automation, the entire sales process moves swiftly and without any risk of human errors. It prevents the salespeople from making tiny mistakes that can turn out to be a massive loss for their business.
Top 5 Sales Automation Tips
The five essential sales automation tips that not only reduce the workload of your sales team but also improve every aspect of your business are:
Lead Prioritization
While prospecting the customer, additional information about them proves to be relatively helpful. You can seamlessly make connections with the customer if you have information concerning their company’s name, the goods or services they offer, their vendor details, and their social media presence. It leaves a good impression on the prospects if you have done proper research before approaching them.
Sales automation software includes lead enrichment tools that assist you to assemble updated information from multiple sources effortlessly. You can acquire a complete profile of your prospects, build relationships with them and convert them into your leads.
Contact Management
At times, doing mundane and manual tasks repeatedly becomes relatively frustrating. You risk letting your contacts slip out of the funnel. Nonetheless, if you have automated your contract management process, you tend to save a lot of your time. With the help of an appropriate sales automation CRM, you can streamline the entire sales process easily.
Rather than spending most of your time obtaining phone numbers and email addresses, you can manage all your contacts on the central platform. With the help of automation, your contact details get updated automatically.
Your sales team also remains on the same page when you automate the task assignment and sales routing. This way, you can track the work of your sales team and pick up from where you have left off.
Email Automation
When you have a list of people in your sales pipeline, it becomes impossible to write emails for each one of them individually. But when you have automated your email marketing, you can efficiently create a series of emails perfectly modified according to the needs of your customer. It also enables you to send these emails at a specific time.
Therefore, instead of writing and sending each email manually, it provides you with the time for creating a copy that encourages them to take action.
Automated Quoting And Proposal
Quoting and proposal are considered one of the most critical steps in the sales cycle. It enables you to create the customer’s first impression in today’s competitive marketplace. However, while generating proposals or quotes, the sales team faces multiple challenges, such as retrieving data manually, pulling inaccurate data or information, etc. It slows down the process and impacts the business’ accuracy, customer experience, and overall revenue generation dramatically.
So, if you want your proposal to work for your business, you can automate your quoting and proposal software. It protects you from the manual processes hurdle that holds up the sales cycle.
Automate Inventory Management
Inventory management is yet another critical aspect of product-based businesses. In this digital era, customers have a variety of marketplaces to shop for a particular product. Businesses are looking into it as an opportunity to boost sales. But selling the same product on different platforms can be quite challenging due to unsynchronised, inaccurate, and inorganized systems.
Having automated inventory management complements the efforts put in by the sales team, enhances the loyalty of the customers, and assists you in creating a multichannel strategy. It helps the sales team in promoting products and generating additional revenue by upselling and cross-selling products. It also provides the sales team with price tiers and discounts that help them in converting hesitant customers as their leads.
Above all, automated inventory management is effective for both the sales team and the customers. It helps the sales team in leveraging real-time data on stock levels and pricing to close a deal. On the contrary, it provides customers with information about the product that is in stock and makes the delivery process faster.
Key Takeaway
When you automate your sales process and leverage artificial intelligence, you tend to reduce redundancy in sales tasks. It minimizes the time and effort of your salespeople by eliminating annoying but necessary administrative tasks.
With sales automation, you provide your customers with consistent updates concerning products and services as well as offer them a good level of personalization. It assists you in driving more leads to your business and boosting your conversion rates.
Fortunately, you have a variety of sales automation tools available. By giving the most appropriate and effective tool to your sales team, you can maximize the sales process and streamline the operations, to achieve the goals faster.
