Sales Process Automation: Best Ways to Automate Your Sales
In this blog, we will discuss how it improves your sales automation course. We will also point out how you can effectively use automation to reduce your sales team’s burden.
What is sales process automation?
The sales squad plays an important role in your organization. They help boost sales and increase your organization’s revenue. A sales crew typically carries out the following functions:
- Market research.
- Advertising for sales.
- Sales.
- Sales correspondence.
- Service.
- Deciding the type of packing.
- Warehouse management.
These are the main functions. But to do these tasks efficiently they must also perform certain repetitive tasks. Thanks to the sales automation tools, we can now automate these routine tasks.
Essentially, sales automation is the use of digital tools to automate the sales management workflow. It streamlines the progression, reducing the time and workforce needed. It allows the sales representatives to focus on selling the products. Efficient use of automation in sales results in higher ROI.
Benefits of Automating Your Sales:
As we all know, automation can do wonders in improving the growth of any field. In sales, it proves useful in many situations. Before knowing the ways to automate your sales, we will take a look at how it benefits you.
1. Implementation made easy:
As technology improves, so does the automation software. It is all about simplifying the sales route and making it easy for the people. So most modern software does not take much time to install and settle in as a part of your organization. It is just like installing an app on your mobile. You don’t need to train the software to adapt as you do for sales freshers. Good automation software reduces the need for an expert to be present at all times.
2. All-inclusive tool:
Automation software usually packs many features apart from just the automation tools. Most of them have a visual workflow builder. Which reduces the time to create workflows by half. Better yet, lead management automation tools manage everything from start to end. No human intervention is required. You need not focus on documentation of the chats you had with your customer. The software keeps track of every interaction with your prospects/customers.
3. Lead prioritization:
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Not every individual who interacts with your website/product is a prospect. It is very important to rank the leads before the sales rep contacts them. But it is nearly impossible to rank leads manually. Automation software helps you by automatically ranking leads based on pre-set conditions. Thus, allowing the sales crew to prioritize the leads they contact. It prevents you from spending your time on low-quality leads.
4. Analytics:
Analyzing your sales process for bottlenecks is a long and time-consuming method. Tooling automation greatly reduces the time and effort taken to create reports. Human-made reports are often error-prone. Whereas the software analyses real-time data to produce fast and accurate reports.
5. Prevent errors:
It is possible for your sales squad to completely forget about a high-ranking lead. But with a proper automation tool in place, no prospects will slip through your fingers. When the software automates almost every other task, your sales reps can focus on your customers. The efficiency of your team also increases due to the prevention of errors in the process.
6. Sales forecasts:
Manual sales forecast considers only a limited amount of customer data. Which effectively reduces your forecast’s accuracy. You can find better sales strategies by relying on automated sales forecasts. You can easily tweak even the puny dull areas in your sales, to achieve better sales and revenue.
These are the benefits you can gain from using sales automation software. As you can see, it simplifies the work, all the while amplifying productivity.
Best ways to automate your sales
As said earlier, there are several tools in sales automation software. Depending on the way you use it, the results vary. The following are some of the best ways to use automation to grow your sales.
1. Automate emails:
Source: PeppyBiz
Did you know? Sales representatives spend more than 20% of their time sending emails that have similar content. It rips out a huge chunk of time of their day. If your organization suffers from the same trouble, it is time to consider automation.
With a powerful email automation tool, you only need to create one email template for a category. From here, the software takes over and saves you from the repetitive task of sending emails. The following are some emails you can automate:
- Welcome emails.
- Demonstration emails.
- Follow-up emails.
- Reminder emails.
- Thank you emails.
- Cart abandonment notification emails.
Through automation, you can send personal emails to a lot of leads. Thus, improving the conversion rate and probability of prospects.
But, you also should consider adding a human touch wherever necessary. Emails that involve discussion of legal terms are one instance where you shouldn’t use automation.
2. Automate lead prioritization:
There are multiple situations where a lead keeps the sales players on the hook. But never actually buys anything. Spending time on such leads is a waste of time. And not to mention a waste of the organization’s resources. Employing automation will help you prioritize leads. The software carries out the ranking based on various aspects of a lead.
Lead scoring is a lead management automation tool that will be of use in this situation. For lead ranking/scoring, you need implicit and explicit user data. You do not have to worry about collecting such information. Most automation software has tools that track site visitors to automatically rank them based on your lead scoring model.
A major advantage of using AI-led scoring is the option to set up various lead scoring models for various products. The sales crew can concentrate on leads who are on the edge of the sales funnel, while your software does the rest.
3. Automate lead nurturing:
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Lead nurturing is the process of smoothly moving your lead towards conversion. A lead must go through all the phases of the sales funnel before converting. The sales funnel has the following stages:
- Awareness phase.
- Interest phase.
- Evaluation phase.
- Decision phase.
- Purchase phase.
- Reevaluation phase.
- Repurchase phase.
After the advent of software for automation, sales personnel only contact the lead after the third phase. If you start a conversation with a lead in the awareness phase, you are wasting your time. Let the automation answer common questions and persuade them in the initial phases. Save your charming selling skills for the later phases.
4. Use personalized tokens:
There used to be a time when automated messages sounded robotic. Companies try to avoid these kinds of interactions with their future customers. The idea of automated robotic conversation has become a thing of the past. But still, a few companies use it as a reason to avoid automation.
With the use of personalized tokens, the software has a meaningful conversation with prospects. The software assigns tokens by tracking the activity of users on your website. The result? A personal conversation and a well-engaged/qualified lead.
5. Automate lead handover process:
Sometimes the sales team loses quality leads due to poor handover from one stage to another. But with an efficient lead management automation tool, you get notified every time a lead rotation takes place. You will never leave any potential customer unattended for long intervals of time.
The automation of every sales process software obeys the workflow of the sales team. When automating the workflow, naturally eliminates any bottlenecks in the process. The software handovers the prospect to the respective salesperson.
6. Automate report generation:
Source: PeppyBiz
Report generation, when done manually, is a hectic task. But, automation saves your time and produces reports with just a few clicks. Since it acts as centralized storage, it has all the information it ever needs. Reports are one of the most important parts of the strategy development process. So why delay the process by manually creating reports? Switch to automation and save time to sell more.
7. Effortless meeting scheduling:
Source: PeppyBiz
Imagine your prospect is a business/organization. You send a schedule for a free demo of your product, and they get back with a different schedule. It is frustrating to arrange for a meeting that suits both parties schedules. It is inefficient, and not to mention, reckless. The prospect might contact your competitor in the meantime.
An automation tool can help you with the scheduling process. It sends over your schedule to the prospect. So that they can choose a time that suits them. No more back and forth alteration to the scheduled meeting.
8. Automate the creation of sales quotes:
Finding a high-ranking prospect is an exciting moment. The excitement drops when you have to create long sales quotes. The old copy-paste methods are prone to errors and take a lot of time. Sales automation tools can efficiently create quotes easily based on customer data. Those quotations just need your final approval before getting automatically sent to the prospect.
The prospect can finalize the deal by signing the quote or sending it over for further amendments. Notifying the customer about the signing process is also the software’s job. You can also set workflows that send the quotes directly to the legal team. You just have to lay out a path, automation will take care of the rest.
9. Automate invoice management:
The sales team’s job doesn’t stop after closing the deal. It continues until the filing of the bill/invoice. But, this is an administrative task that consumes a lot of sales-worthy time. Modern automation software understands the need for additional time for selling products. Most sales automation software comes with tools that can prepare accurate invoices.
With all the necessary details already in the database, you can automate the process of creating distinct invoices. You can easily deliver the invoice and start working on gaining future customers.
10. Stay synchronized:
Your sales team might already be using some sales management tools. If you are planning to buy sales automation software, it is going to be beneficial. But, you are skeptical about feeding it with the huge repository of data. It must take time and a lot of resources, right? No!
All automation tools come with easy ways to integrate with other third-party software. They can easily gather the required data from the software in use. You can rest well knowing that there will be no discrepancies in the customer data as well.
Conclusion
Automation services have truly revolutionized the way everything works in the world. With automation features, the sales team from many organizations has made huge triumphs. To sum up, automation, when employed in any sector, is going to improve it. Especially, the sales team has found a new way to approach their prospects, without having to pester everyone.
After reading this blog, you must know that implementing automation software truly streamlines the workflow in every way possible. You must also have realized that managing automation software is not a heavy task. Rocket your sales today with a powerful sales automation service by your side.
Guest Blog by PeppyBiz
PeppyBiz is one of the leading SaaS providers, offering a variety of business solutions. We specialize in modernizing every part of your business through automation software. Check out our website today, to learn more about our products and services.
Author Bio:
Sara Williams
Sara is a content writer at PeppyBiz, a platform that provides lead generation software through which companies can stimulate and capture customers’ interest in their product or service.
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