In the everyday world of sales, certain tasks can get repetitive that they feel redundant. But these tasks are far from redundant, especially your pipeline tasks. However, if you are smart, you can find a way to make these tasks feel like a burden.
Enter: sales automation.
What is Sales Automation?
To automate means to “convert (a process or facility) to be operated by largely automatic equipment or software.” Sales automation in CRM is a software-based solution for making processes and systems more efficient, less time-consuming, and overall easier to perform.
Sales automation these days have—literally—become smarter, with the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which helps you further with productivity, data management and analytics, lead segmentation, and more.
Why Do You Need Sales Automation?
- You save time and resources. You should be using most of your time selling, not fulfilling tasks like updating the database or scheduling meetings. Sales automation does these little tasks for you.
- You are more organized. Whatever the size of your sales team, you will need to get organized. With sales automation, managers have immediate access to all the data they need for monitoring and reporting. They also have access to their team managers because the whole team uses one efficicent process/platform.
- You boost your productivity. This level of organization has the greatest impact on your productivity—yours and the team’s. With minimal back-and-forth and by minimizing human error, the team will function like clockwork. Pipeline strategies are immediately enforced, decisions are quickly made—and these things are important because speed is always integral in sales.
- You decrease costs. With the saved time and resources, high organization, and increased productivity, companies are bound to decrease overhead costs in the long run.
Who Should Use Sales Automation?
Anybody from your organization, reps and managers alike, should use sales automation. However, supervision is key. A poorly planned sales automation process will not work.
It is also not wise to wholly depend on sales automation. The human touch is still important in sales: customers will still need human interaction and a relationship with their sales reps. Don’t fall into the trap of automating everything and not personally engaging with your clients or prospects. They will quickly move on to the next sales rep who will give them a more personalized service.
What or When Do You Automate?
- Communication: Sales automation just makes daily communication more efficient, so you don’t lose opportunities just because you forgot to follow up.
- Emails – Create templates, compose emails, save them in drafts and schedule for sending or send them immediately.
- Dialing – Dial leads directly from your CRM. Power dialer is also a very nifty tool.
- Call Logging – Log all inbound and outbound calls so you can monitor all callls.
- Texting – Create templates, and send and receive text messages.
- List Building: Search for leads, upload old and new contacts on a database. Manage all your leads and move them across pipelines easily.
- Task Building: Add daily tasks and set reminders.
- Workflow Building: Create public and private customized workflows, add relevant people to the workflows, and manage teams and processes more effectively. Managers can track performance of reps without difficulty.
- Lead Prioritization: Confused on who to call first from your list of prospects? With sales automation, it will tell you which lead has the highest score and therefore should be prioritized. This helps you identify prospects who will most likely convert into opportunities.
- Lead Management: Managers can move leads across pipelines and assign them to the proper sales reps. This way, all leads receive the proper attention they need.
- Appointment Setting: Have a calendar client and arrange and track meetings, and send invites to meeting guests.
- Split Testing: Split testing is a powerful tool in sales. Create A/B split with sequenced automation and see which approach or campaign works better.
How do You Do Sales Automation?
Integrating a CRM that has all the requisite features of sales automation and other powerful tools is the way to go. Lucrativ is one: it’s a highly mobile and customizable CRM that integrates automation with pipeline management, a multichannel customer connectivity center, operational insights and real-time reporting, and powerful artificial intelligence.
Photo by Ahsan Avi on Unsplash
