Scale Your Business with Sales Automation
You are in charge of managing a sales team. Your sales reps spend about 65% of their time on non-revenue-generating tasks. They lose time handling information like account data, sales records, products, prospects, and customers. You lose money on the sales you missed in that time. To make matters worse, managing all the information is exponentially more difficult and time-consuming as your customer list grows.
Time spent on these non-sales tasks prevents you from growing your business. And you don’t have the time to train your reps differently. This is why you need sales automation. It gives back your time.
You can find tools to make sales about selling again, not menial work. Sales automation tools increase your productivity and decrease your wasted time. We have experience automating the sales processes of our clients. Let’s explain how.
What is Sales Automation?
Sales automation is the process of automating tasks along your sales value chain. You want your sales team to focus on selling rather than on administration. Another word for this is sales enablement. Sales automation tackles administrative and data-entry tasks. Sales automation tools usually use AI software. They are split into specific tasks.
The tasks that can be automated include:
- Planning coverage
- Monitoring pipeline health
- Gathering market intelligence
- Creating customer profiles
- Automating marketing and sales workflows
- Evaluating Lead
- Prioritizing Lead
- Lead engagement
- Standardized emails
- Scheduling calls
- Tracking prospect interactions
Configuring, pricing, and quoting
- Summarizing services or products (Marketing Collateral)
- Generating proposals
- Responding to inquiries with Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Discount management workflow
- Cross/up-selling recommendations
- Journey optimization
- Auto-renewing contracts
As you can see, most sales tasks nowadays can be automated. However, only about one in four businesses have automated a sales process. With about a third of all sales tasks able to be automated, many businesses are missing potential growth. Why is sales automation so critical?
Why is Sales Automation Critical to Scaling Your Business?
Automation helps everyone. Customers get faster turnarounds. You get higher sales-force productivity. And sales reps get greater job satisfaction. Here are some more sales automation benefits:
- Sales and Marketing Integration
We all know that sales and marketing are not mutually exclusive. But many businesses still separate their sales and marketing teams. The results are misaligned goals, inconsistent messaging, and a lack of accountability. Sales and marketing are joined processes. So, sales automation can also involve automating and integrating your marketing strategy.
- Smarter Prospecting and Nurturing
Identifying prospects is taxing when using an outdated process. By the time you identify a lead, you missed out on other potential sales. A lead should be contacted within the first five minutes of activity. Sales automation processes identify and score leads based on activity trends and then notify sales reps when a prospect is most likely to purchase. No more time spent manual prospecting. Automated tracking of client engagement allows sales reps to make more targeted, profitable decisions.
Automation can also help nurture your customer relationships. It collects statistics about customers to understand their needs and wants, letting you be more customer-centric.
- More Consistent Data and Easier Reporting
There are fewer chances for error when you automate your tasks. More consistent data means no discrepancies and fewer costly mistakes. Automating sales also can mean automating team reporting with the help of CRM software. Learn more about CRM software here.
As you can see, investing in automation is worth it. Especially if you have a limited budget or a small team, automation lets you maximize the talent you have at hand. We can help you automate. Learn what our sales team can do for you.
How do You Implement Sales Automation Successfully?
Now you know the basics and benefits of sales automation. You need a strategy to deploy it successfully. Just because you can automate everything doesn’t mean you should.
First, we recommend you have standardized sales processes before automating. Standardized processes can decrease the costs of data integration, technology integration, and change management. The leaner your internal sales processes are beforehand, the faster you can automate.
Then, you will have to review your implementation plan based on your sales process, your competition, and your customer preferences. In total, implementing sales automation into your business usually takes six to eighteen months.
We recommend breaking your implementation into five phases:
- Create a current and future state sales map of your process (with your team)
- Get help selecting the right technology platforms you need
- Prioritize issues that have the greatest impact with the least amount of work
- Take on micro areas for automation (don’t try to take on the entire process at once)
- Scale up your automation
How do you sell sales automation to your team?
Show how it makes your sales reps’ lives easier. Periodic meetings with sales reps engage, inform, and build support for automation. Salespeople need to be trained in the systems for sales automation to be effective. As menial tasks are reduced, you can increase targets and incentives for your reps based on KPIs to encourage buy-in for the change.