Companies often apply sales automation to improve their sales process’s efficiency and increase their sales team’s productivity. They try to automate repetitive, manual tasks so their sales reps can have more time to find qualified leads and close deals.
In this article, we’ll explain in detail what sales automation is, why it matters, its pros and cons, where you can implement it, and how you can do that. You’ll also learn the best sales automation software in 2021.
What Is Sales Automation?
Sales automation refers to using software, artificial intelligence, and other technologies to automate tedious tasks for sales reps. Tasks that can be automated include importing and updating data, scheduling appointments, scoring leads, and more.
Why Is Sales Automation Important?
McKinsey Global Institute’s cross-functional research found that more than 30% of sales-related activities can be automated. Also, companies that implement sales automation can expect efficiency improvements of 10% to 15% and sales uplift potential of up to 10%.
Sales automation typically helps your company the following:
- Improve sales process and sales productivity: Without automating repeated tasks, sales reps have to deal with those tasks every day. This may distract them from doing more important activities, fail to meet sales goals, and suffer from burnout. Sales automation can help free up your sales reps’ time and mental energy to complete things that matter.
- Increase customer satisfaction: When you aren’t distracted by administrative tasks, you can focus more on responding to leads’ questions and fulfilling their needs. This makes the leads feel like they’re valued.
- Manage data effectively and turn it into actionable insights: Besides automating tasks, sales automation software also helps collect data, analyze it, and provide valuable insights into leads’ expectations, buying interests, trends, etc.
Where Can You Implement Sales Automation?
Here are some areas you can improve with sales automation:
- Prospecting: Automatically searching, filtering, and identifying potential leads. Gathering all the information about the leads you need to create messaging that speaks to them.
- Contact creation: Correctly entering lead information whenever someone downloads your marketing materials or approaches you via email. You can set triggers and conditions to match leads and sales reps according to skills and experience.
- Lead screening: Automatically sorting and prioritizing leads based on demographics and behavioral data from sources.
- Email automation: Creating automated email flows and campaigns with personalized messaging. Then, scheduling emails to send to leads at the time that they’re engaged with their inbox. You can also create email templates that are easily customized and reused whenever you want.
- Sales calls: Logging call notes, analyzing responses, and providing insights into leads. You can use insights to determine who you should retarget and the best way to do that after the call ends.
- Deal management: Managing agenda, scheduling appointments, recording calls, accounting for each event, and providing detailed reports about customer engagement.
- Proposal development: Auto-filling customer data, quotes, product details, and pricing information.
- Reporting: Creating reports and providing sales reps with real-time data on critical metrics like conversion rates.
Sales Automation Pros and Cons
Like any other technological advancements, sales automation has its own advantages and disadvantages. Here they are:
Pros:
- Free up time and resources for your sales reps.
- Simplify several tasks in the sales process.
- Track all communications with prospects in one place.
- Provide faster responses to customers, making them happier.
- Get actionable insights into leads, prospects, and customers.
- Improve sales reps’ productivity, leading to increased revenue.
Cons:
- It can’t replace human intervention regarding creating and maintaining a personal connection with customers.
- Customers can feel annoyed if they find out an email is sent automatically or the person they’re talking with is a chatbot.
- Some sales automation software requires a certain level of technical knowledge or familiarity.
- The deployment may take time as sales reps may have a resistance to change.
It’s clear that there are some risks when implementing sales automation. But you can avoid those challenges with the right technology in the right hands.
Sales Automation Software
Sales automation can be classified into the following types. Choose the one that best suits your business’s current situations and helps you achieve your sales goals:
- AI sales assistant software is an AI-powered tool that can assist your sales reps in qualifying leads, managing pipelines, forecasting demand, and more.
- Marketing automation software enables companies to automate and streamline marketing activities and workflows like customer segmentation, cross-sell and upsell. Marketing automation can help increase sales leads to 50% at 33% lower cost per lead.
- Lead generation software allows you to automatically generate and collect leads from different channels, including email, phone, SMS, live chat, landing pages, and social media. With the right tool, you can have more quality leads, expand your customer base, and achieve higher conversion rates.
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you simplify managing relationships with customers and suppliers. With CRM, you can control data in one single place, share and update data in real-time, and more.
- Customer communication (CCM) software is designed for managing inbound and outbound communications with customers. Using this solution, you can provide a consistent experience for customers and maintain your branding across all channels.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one sales automation platform, try Revenue Grid. It’s a powerful solution that works as your AI assistant and can help your sales reps at each stage of the sales cycle. With Revenue Grid, automating tasks and processes like lead qualification, pipeline management, forecasting, and data entry becomes effortless.
How to Deploy Sales Automation Successfully
Consider following these tips to implement sales automation successfully:
- Determine your goal and budget because they will affect what type of sales automation software you should choose.
- Understand your target audiences, for example, who they are, where they often hang out, what they expect to get from you. You should also segment them into different groups with the same interests and predict their buying journey.
- Sit down with your sales team to learn about what challenges they’re facing and what tasks they want to be automated. Don’t automate randomly.
- Prepare an automation plan with a specific timeline, persons in charge, and metrics to measure results.
- Choose the right sales automation software. Research different types of solutions and take advantage of free trials or demos to trial them.
Start Using Sales Automation Today!
Sales automation is an effective solution to enhance your sales reps’ productivity and drive revenue. But to truly unlock its benefits, you need a comprehensive platform that works well with your current tech stack while guiding you to automate sales tasks effectively.
That’s exactly what you’ll get with Revenue Grid. Contact us for a demo today, and our expert teams will show you how to deploy it for your company.
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