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Here Are 8 Reasons Why You Need Sales Automation
Sales automation helps to speed up your sales processes. But do you really need it? Here are 8 reasons why we say YES.
Reading time: 8 minutes
With the business landscape becoming more competitive than ever, building a seamless and efficient sales workflow is the key differentiator for every successful business.
Thanks to technological advances in recent years, you can make your sales process faster, more intuitive, and convenient with automated sales processes.
Simply put, sales automation is a cost-effective and time-saving strategy empowering sales teams to knock milestones off the park month after month. This versatile strategy can improve lead generation and targeting while enhancing customer engagement and sales reporting.
That explains why 51% of businesses have automated their sales process while the remaining 58% plan to do so in the next few years.
So, if you’re looking to learn more about what sales automation is and how it value-adds to your sales process, this article will answer all your questions. Let’s dive right into it!
Contents
What is sales automation?
Sales automation tackles all repetitive and mundane tasks, allowing sales reps to focus on what they do best — selling. Automation lets you streamline effort-intensive functions that provide little to no value in the sales process.
For example, the email that your sales reps send for the initial contact with a lead. You can easily automate this process of registering the lead’s information and triggering an email sequence with the first email and multiple follow-ups — saving hours of manual work, which you can put on auto-pilot with a single click.
11 elements of the sales process you can automate
A 7-step sales cycle can overwhelm any sales team — especially when you lack the resources, bandwidth, and expertise to complete every step in the sales process. But a well-defined automation framework can simplify the process exponentially.
When you can automate more than 30% of sales-related activities, what’s stopping you? Let’s take a look at some aspects you can automate in your sales workflow.
Email automation
On average, only 8.5% of cold emails receive a response.
With such a low and competitive response rate, your sales reps will need extra help to send as many emails as possible. This is where email automation campaigns can save your sales teams a great deal of time while streamlining the email outreach process.
Email automation can cover multiple aspects, including:
- Sending cold emails
- Triggering follow-up emails
- Scheduling retargeting emails
For example, you can use sales automation tools to create a lead nurturing email sequence and trigger it when you add a new prospect to the CRM database.
Social media outreach
Social outreach focuses on sending personalized messages on social media platforms for prospecting leads.
An average salesperson spends 17% of their day researching social networks and sending pitch messages. After these exhaustive efforts, hitting a dead end can demotivate the sales team and decrease their productivity.
Automating this part of your outreach strategy can produce fantastic results, such as:
- Enable a greater degree of personalization
- Allow more effective lead filtering
- Help in scaling lead generation efforts
- Track insights and drive conversion rates
Take a leaf from AlchemyLeads’ playbook to automate your social media outreach process — which secured them a 240% increase in monthly leads.
The SEO agency created an automated workflow wherein as soon as a prospect accepts a LinkedIn connect request, they receive a completely personalized message with an offer for a free video audit. The automation workflow also triggers a follow-up mail if the prospect doesn’t accept the LinkedIn request.
Omnichannel sales engagement
Modern-day sales focus heavily on creating a memorable customer experience. To that end, an omnichannel sales engagement strategy strives to deliver a seamless experience to potential clients through unified and seamless communication across different channels.
Automating your omnichannel sales framework will allow you to deliver a consistent brand experience with multiple touchpoints with the sales team.
For example, Marks & Spencer managed to automate their omnichannel presence across various physical stores, on-demand contact centers, and online shopping platforms. The retail brand integrated multiple communication channels — web engagement, social media, webchat, SMS, parcels and mail, voice, and email.
Automate outbound cold calls and sales outreach
Automating cold calls can minimize your team’s workload for outbound sales. Instead of manually dialing every number, use Novocall’s autodialer to make as many cold calls as possible with proper reporting and analytics.
Novocall allows you to:
- Automatically dial through long lists of contacts to make calls more efficiently
- Make international calls and read prospects in 42 countries
- Track every agent’s performance through a detailed dashboard
Lead conversion
A sales automation tool can help sales professionals convert visitors into customers effortlessly — maximizing your conversion rate. Engage with your prospects and inform them about the benefits of your product or service with instant calls.
For instance, Novocall’s click-to-call feature allows your web visitors to schedule callbacks with your reps. Maintain instant communication with your inbound leads and increase your chances of closing the deal with this automated functionality.
Automate appointment scheduling
Instead of sending endless emails, clients can call the sales staff directly. Automate call scheduling with a click by integrating your appointment scheduling page onto your website for both desktop and mobile.
Simplifying the scheduling process for your prospect can increase your chances of securing the deal. It offers convenience to both your leads and sales reps.
This is where TimeSync comes in handy with a one-click functionality to schedule any and every kind of call!
Lead scoring
Sales automation tools can help you prioritize your leads so you can focus on the most promising ones and ensure that you’re closing these lucrative deals faster. You can set the criteria for this prioritization according to your overall business strategy and guide your sales reps to focus more on leads falling in the upper brackets.
For instance, a lead responding positively to your first message will get a higher rank than another prospect sending a neutral or negative response.
Qualifying and prioritizing leads based on specific predefined parameters can narrow down your efforts and offer close attention to more promising leads.
Lead enrichment
A sales executive can better target a potential client when they have all the data about the prospect’s preferences. This is where lead enrichment will allow you to prepare a tailormade pitch, customize follow-up messages, and create a positive impression on the prospect.
An automated lead enrichment process gives you a competitive edge with clean and reliable data. Sales reps can either use lead enrichment software or do it manually to ensure they’re reaching out to the right people.
Lead distribution
A lead distribution system forwards your entire set of leads to different sales reps. Perfecting this process can mean warm and high-value leads go to the most qualified salespeople to handle the conversation — ultimately converting them into clients. This reduces lead response time and ensures maximum customer satisfaction.
An automated lead distribution system categorizes the leads based on certain criteria, such as language, country, or relevant department. These leads will then go to your sales agents based on their level of expertise and skill to handle prospects.
Sales alerts
Sales alerts present a great way to close deals faster. A sales alert will inform your sales reps anytime a prospect takes a sales-oriented step or acts on a call-to-action.
With a sales automation tool, your team will receive instant updates about such actions and connect with the customer as quickly as possible—completing their purchase in no time. You can set up these notifications on both mobile and desktop devices.
Sales reporting
As a sales representative, you might deal with several reports daily, including the number of calls, lead status, conversions, and so on. Not only is it time-consuming to create these reports, but there is also a considerable risk of inaccuracy.
Instead, a sales automation solution can swiftly prepare multiple reports without errors. It helps you avoid draining your team’s efficiency in this mundane task and rely on an automated workflow to produce error-free reports.
8 reasons why you need sales automation
If you think automation will only help you improve the sales process, that’s not where it ends. In 2021, nearly 61% of companies that used automation exceeded their revenue targets — demonstrating the potential of sales automation.
Let’s take a look at some of the other advantages that sales automation can provide for your company.
1. You improve efficiency and productivity
Sales automation minimizes a sales agent’s time spent on non-sales activities. Doing that naturally improves their productivity — evident by the fact that automation can boost sales efficiency by 14.5%.
For example, Linkedin sales prospecting manually takes up a chunk of time for B2B sales reps. You can export leads from LinkedIn, enrich them with contact data, and leverage automation to speed up the multi-step process of sending connection requests and initial messages. They can even send an automated email and follow up quickly.
2. You can scale your customer acquisition
Automating your sales process is not just about efficiency. It also enhances the resources available at your team’s disposal for client acquisition. Sales automation tools to capture, qualify, and distribute leads can produce accurate and extensive data for helping your sales reps target prospects better.
Besides, sales automation also enables organizations to track their marketing campaigns and determine whether or not they are achieving the desired result.
3. You get accurate data-backed results
A minor mistake in your sales process can result in a significant loss. With more analytical data and contextual information, sales automation reduces the chance of human errors. Working with accurate data can assist your sales team in converting a potential customer faster.
Moreover, automation improves data consistency across the entire company, facilitating better coordination and faster results.
4. You reduce lead conversion time
With a 360-degree picture of a customer’s profile, a sales automation framework enables businesses to evaluate buying behaviors and interaction preferences for new prospects while identifying customers most likely to churn from the existing batch.
So, automation helps you boost sales conversion rates and reduce churn simultaneously. It’s also visible that 80% of companies using sales automation multiplied their leads dramatically.
5. You can automatically engage customers down the funnel
While automation certainly increases your customer acquisition outputs, it also promises better customer engagement.
Sales automation tools allow your sales reps to analyze data about customer preferences and generate relevant content — like webinars, explainer videos, and marketing campaigns — for greater engagement. This is also crucial to deliver personalized experiences and win their loyalty down the funnel.
6. You can reuse smart, high-converting templates and proposals that work
Automation software can generate smart templates for proposals and accurate quotes utilizing the most up-to-date price criteria—ultimately saving your time and effort on creating standard sales documents.
Customize these templates for as many leads as required and share them in various formats, including word documents, PDFs, and web-based proposals.
7. Delight your customers with a positive post-sales experience
With a carefully crafted sales automation framework, you can reimagine the customer experience and build a streamlined buying, tracking, and query management process. Don’t limit automation to just converting a lead.
Build trust, create a positive brand image, and win their loyalty through impeccable after-sales service using sales automation.
You can use automation to send customer satisfaction surveys, troubleshoot their queries, share helpful resources, and offer promotional discounts.
8. You get access to quick and comprehensive reporting
Manually preparing sales reports is taxing. You have to spend hours creating reports before sending them to stakeholders and organizational teams. But the challenge doesn’t end there; what if an error is discovered later in the reporting process?
You can remove the need to create manual reports with sales automation. Not only does automation speed up the process of creating these reports, but it also eliminates inaccuracies to a great extent. Put reporting on auto-pilot and share this comprehensive data with the stakeholders confidently.
Conclusion
Sales automation is a win-win situation for both the sales reps and the prospects. Your customers will appreciate the short turnaround time while your sales personnel benefit from the increased productivity.
Understanding your leads’ behavior and intent is essential for enhancing the sales process. Sales automation accomplishes this and offers a holistic approach to increasing your conversion rate. It empowers your sales team to concentrate on what they do best: providing value to clients and selling.
So, use this article to understand sales automation better and get ready to automate your sales processes!
Eduard Klein
Eduard is an International Digital Growth Marketer, Blogger, and Entrepreneur with a global mindset. He guides through the process of starting and growing a digital business, and riding the wave of digital technology and marketing without getting swept away.
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