Looking to close more deals and maximize your business’s revenue? Technology (sales automation software) could be the driving force you didn’t know was missing.
Hard facts: Companies with the right sales automation software usually get 53% higher conversion rates and 3.1% higher annual revenue growth than those without it – Aberdeen Group.
Unlocking the potential of sales automation with top-notch software will help your team soar to new heights and take your organization to its highest level. Why? When built correctly, sales automation improves sales across teams, distribution channels, partners, and customers, enabling your sales team to focus more on closing deals with high-value prospects while maintaining excellent relationships with existing customers.
Types of Sales Automation For Your Business
Just like marketing automation and business process automation, sales automation isn’t just one size fits all. It’s highly customizable to meet the needs of any sales team – no matter what type, shape, or size. Here are a few examples:
- Automated Sales Follow-up Guidance: With this form of sales automation, your sales team will consistently receive notes and reminders from your sales automation software. The automation will help the team remain on top of prospects that can be converted into high-value customers.
- Lead Attribution Automation: When trying to convert your prospects into customers, sales automation CRMs allow sales executives to use rules and filters to create more accurate and robust reports on the type/quality of leads you have in your system. You’ll be able to take a glance at your leads’ behaviors or characteristics, click-through rates, email open rates, and social media searches so that you can send them relevant content to convert them.
- Communication Automation: Automating sales communication such as appointment setup and follow-up, targeted interest email sequences, and live calls/voicemails are crucial to your success in sales. Here’s why:
- Appointment scheduling tools save sales agents time and help them work with customers quickly and conveniently. They help to schedule meetings fast and give the lead access to reschedule on their own.
- A targeted interest email sequence means your leads will receive every bit of information about your products or services they are interested in.
- With automated voicemails, your sales agents are able to record messages beforehand. Leads automatically get a voicemail when they don’t answer their phones and sales team members save time.
- Automated Research: While your sales team can search the web and comb social media for key information on customers or prospects, a sales automation tool helps to fine-tune that information, and updates your leads’ profiles, helping the reps predict the possibility of converting each lead. The best part? Every piece of information on your leads is available in a central repository so all members of the sales team can easily access it.
- Automated Sales Documentation Processes: Oftentimes, manual data entry is time-consuming and hectic. But with sales automation, your sales team will spend less time creating and updating sales data. Automation makes it possible to auto-fill prices, contact details, product details, and other significant information such as recent purchases, discounts, and the worth of all-time purchases for your customers.
Other automated sales documentation processes are:
- Activity logging: Sales automation CRMs accurately document phone calls, in-person visits, and other activities in your engagement history with prospects.
- Automated record creation: When synced with your landing pages and lead generation channels, sales automation tools instantly create new contacts/profiles as soon as you have new opt-ins.
How to Use Sales Automation to Speed up Conversions and Increase ROIs
- Automate Customer Feedback: Feedback is important in any business. Your sales automation software can help to learn what’s good and what isn’t from your customers. You can create and automate feedback forms to be sent to customers after buying a product or once a service/project is complete. This will help to improve your sales processes and by extension, your products/services.
- Automate the Booking Process for Sales Calls: You can choose to email every new lead manually, then play the back-and-forth game over email, trying to find a time that works for everyone. But automating sales call bookings through a tool like Calendly will make the entire process seamless, without any friction. How? When a prospect completes the contact form on your website, they receive an automated email or next page with a link to your Calendar. There, they can view and compare the times you/they are available before scheduling a meeting.
- Automate Your Prospecting Emails: In place of using Excel spreadsheets to record the dates and times to email your sales-qualified leads, automate your entire follow-up process by setting up triggers with your sales automation tool. This means you’ll have more time to create targeted, personalized, and sales-oriented content that is reusable.
- Use an Automated Dialer: Set up and integrate automated dialers to cold-call new leads. You can choose to keep the automation ongoing, from one phone number to another, till a human answers the phone. Imagine the reduced time and less human effort that will take.
- Use Chatbot Software for Customer Communication: Chat instantly and unobtrusively with prospects using chatbots. They help to collect all the necessary information about a lead before the first contact with a human. Automated sales chatbots also help to understand what your website visitors need answers to. This further creates an opportunity to solve their problems accurately. Remember they will also be checking out other sites.
Bonus Tip: Do not overlook key information on recipients’ auto-responders!
Let’s say your team sends automated emails to leads but some recipients happen to be out-of-office and have their auto-responders turned on. Ensure to save these auto-responder emails as they sometimes contain contact information that you would have never gotten otherwise.
These contact details are always genuine, and the emails also give you insights into when they will be back in their office.
Setting Up The Right Sales Automation Process for Your Business
The process of converting your leads becomes less rigorous and more efficient as soon as you set up sales automation processes for your business. Here are a few ways to get it right from the get-go.
- Figure out what you want to automate: Learn and understand the type of sales processes you currently have. For example, if your regular leads-to-conversion process begins from meeting prospects at events to exchanging a few pleasantries, exchanging business cards, scheduling phone calls, sending proposals, and closing deals over the phone, make sure to adopt a sales automation tool that accommodates these processes, and if it is impossible to automate all stages, identify those that are most important and prioritize them.
- Test your automation before implementation: After setting up automation for your sales processes, create a test run to re-validate your settings, triggers, and funnel structure. Here, you’ll have an opportunity to correct errors, typos, and settings that may mar what you have built.
Top Sales Automation Tools to Consider for Your Business
- HubSpot: HubSpot has a great, comprehensive sales automation feature that helps businesses generate higher revenue and close more deals. If you own a business or manage a marketing, sales, or customer success team, HubSpot will eliminate the tedious manual work, streamline, and improve how you manage your leads and customers.
- Ontraport: Ontraport is one of the most popular sales and marketing platforms where you can grow and scale your business with fewer human inputs. It has a sales automation CRM feature designed for businesses that are ready to scale. Ontraport provides all the tools you need for selling, marketing, and managing a business online.
Now, you’re ready!
Start by learning the sales processes you want to automate, create a strategy, adopt suitable sales automation tools, then begin to close more deals for your business. And if you need help setting up the right sales automation process, we’d be glad to help!
