The key to succeeding in today’s fiercely competitive sales landscape is working smarter, not harder.
Why spend days trying to finish something that can be completed in a matter of hours?
The sales process is complex, and the more tasks you can delegate, the better. The thing is that you shouldn’t pass these repetitive, time-consuming, and low-level tasks to the members of your team, because they should also be focusing on more creative, high-value activities.
If you’re wondering how to make all this work, automation is the answer.
Here’s a stat to corroborate this claim: brands have experienced a 225% increase in the volume of prospects that turned into business opportunities thanks to lead nurturing automation.
Now, let’s discuss how sales automation can help your business thrive in detail.
1. It Picks Up a Great Deal of Slack
You and your sales reps have to do several day-to-day administrative tasks. This workload can be tedious and overwhelming, which is why you might feel drained and unable to zero in on your efforts actually to sell.
Given that sales reps spend only 37% of their time selling, it’s obvious how greatly they will benefit if you automate a portion of their workload related to sales.
Here’s what you can automate to make it easier for your sales team and give them more room to do their primary job:
Data entry
Every successful CRM is a source of valuable information on prospects, accounts, sales activities, and deals. But that also means that your sales reps have to update it regularly.
If they have to do it manually, they will waste a lot of valuable time, which is why automating CRM data entry can do wonders for your sales reps’ productivity.
Appointment scheduling
When it comes to booking meetings with potential customers, there’s usually a flurry of emails involved.
To eliminate this incessant email ping-pong and streamline the process, you should use appointment scheduling tools such as Calendly. It works by allowing you to create a link to your calendar and forward it to your prospects so that they can book an available slot when it suits them.
Invoice generation
This task can be easily automated, too, as there are integrations that can be added to your CRM so that after closing a deal and updating its status to “Won,” an invoice is automatically generated.
2. It Allows You to Expand Your Customer Base Quickly
New customers are the lifeblood of every business, and since sales reps have to handle a lot of tasks besides closing, they need all the help they can get.
One of their tasks is creating email outreach copy and sending huge batches of emails to potential customers.
Although they’re perfectly capable of doing this, it can’t be denied that they could spend that time more productively, that is, talking to and connecting with their prospects.
On the other hand, email outreach is an excellent strategy for growing your prospect list quickly.
That’s why implementing an email automation tool can be a great solution. Some of them even come with customizable template sequences, so that your sales reps can easily create an outreach campaign and personalize and schedule it in advance.
Such a tool will send emails in batches and mimic human behavior, significantly reducing the odds of your campaigns being sent to spam.
You can also automate different trigger emails – welcome emails, follow-up emails if a prospect doesn’t respond, demo emails or thank you emails to new customers.
3. It Improves Your Customer Experience
The sales process starts before your customer knows that your product or service exists and extends well beyond making a purchase.
In other words, you need to nurture them both before and after they decide to buy from you. Customer experience is a make-it-or-break-it factor not only when it comes to increasing your sales, but also making your customers happy and loyal to your brand.
No wonder that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
However, providing such a show-stopping customer experience heavily relies on your customer support reps. Whenever a prospect or a customer has a question about your product or service, as well as an issue that needs solving, they reach out to your support reps.
And given that not all your customers live in your time zone, you can expect that some will try to contact customer support outside normal business hours. If nobody takes the call, you risk losing a potential customer or alienating an existing one.
The solution to this is automating your customer support by implementing conversational chatbots that will be available around the clock and capable of handling several queries simultaneously. For this approach to be effective, it’s crucial to set up a successful chatbot strategy with which you’ll be able to exceed your customers’ expectations and always be there for them.
4. It Makes Sure You Focus on the Best Business Opportunities
Not all sales leads are equal – some are a perfect fit for your brand while others aren’t.
The trouble is that sometimes it’s hard to tell immediately which ones are most likely to convert and become your paying customers. Especially if your sales funnel is packed with leads.
It would take your sales reps a lot of time to go through all these opportunities and manually analyze their engagement.
But if you automate your lead scoring process, it will be much faster and accurate. Lead scoring tools use different parameters such as your leads’ demographics and behavioral patterns to identify their qualifications.
This system helps your reps know, which leads to prioritize.
However, an automated lead scoring system needs enough customer information to be able to work properly. That’s why you should leverage different resources such as lead capture forms, data about your leads’ online behavior, and engagement on social platforms to obtain the right data.
Automating your sales process will bring numerous benefits to your business. Besides reducing the amount of repetitive, tedious work and freeing up your sales reps’ time, it will also allow them to focus on what they do best – sell.
