Sales teams are constantly under pressure to bring profitable new clients onboard as efficiently as possible. But there are a number of pitfalls that waste sales’ time and derails their focus. 

In order to hit targets, it’s important to drill down into how to get more from your efforts and use the resources at your disposal wisely. The solution is sales automation. Increasing efficiency, creating rapport, decreasing your sales cycle, and tracking your leads are all within your grasp.

Automation isn’t going to replace your human sales force. What it can do, however, is free your team up and give them the time to be more strategic, creative and engaged. As always, we see automation as a means to become more human and personalised in our interactions. Automation should deliver personalisation at scale rather than mass-produce impersonal experiences.

Let’s talk about what sales automation is, why you should use it, and how to best execute it. 

What Is Sales Automation?

A sales automation platform provides a suite of tools that handle the mundane, often-forgotten and time-consuming sales tasks that propel deals forward. It’s also the vehicle that maximizes your efforts, increases your effectiveness and boosts your sales reps’ performance. A recent report showed that automation improved business productivity by an average of 20 percent.

However, it is important to note that while sales automation offers plenty of valuable benefits, it is crucial that you don't over-automate your sales process. Making leads feel like they are being squeezed through your sales funnel will turn them off and do more harm than good.

You’ve probably experienced hard-selling opening gambits through LinkedIn Messenger that are clearly part of an automated numbers game and an immediate turn off. It’s also likely you’ve received poorly personalised and aggressive sales sequences via email that are tantamount to spam.

Automation tools can be used in a more engaging way when the message is carefully crafted to feel human and the ask is for connection instead of a sale straight out the gate. Used properly, these tools can be used to boost your customer experience instead of detracting from it.

How to Automate Your Sales Process 

Stand Out from the Competition

If your messaging is the same as your competitors, sales come down to who has the best pricing. That’s a race to the bottom that nobody wants. Therefore, it is crucial to build credibility, forge strong relationships and offer value long before sales gets involved. 

Reaching and engaging with your buyers where they spend time online enables your company to introduce itself and your brand message in a way that’s helpful and not sales focused. Content is the key component driving the process however, for this to work you need to be certain it is hitting the mark. According to the CMO Council, the number one reason buyers disengage with brands is due to irrelevant content.

Do your research and create and promote content that informs and educates. Content that addresses buyers’ needs and provides valuable information does more than showcase your company’s expertise. It also allows a potential buyer to start educating themself about your company and its products and services. When they are ready embark on the buyer’s journey, if your organisation fits their buying criteria, you will already be top-of-mind and a trusted source.

Automation is the smart and effective layer on top that is fuelled by your marketing efforts and turns marketing data into actionable information for your sales team. 

Qualify Your Leads

Sales teams need a consistent stream of leads to keep their sales pipeline full. Once upon a time, cold calling was considered the best way to achieve this. Thankfully those strategies are largely outdated, and inbound marketing is now considered a more effective, non-disruptive means of initiating and developing relationships with potential clients. 

SocialMediaToday reported 60% of marketers said their most important strategic goal of marketing automation was ‘lead generation’. Skilfully crafted posts, calls-to-action and lead magnets are designed to draw prospects into what should be viewed as a genuinely helpful and value driven relationship. 

However, it is important for marketing to realise that not all leads are created equal, especially from sales’ point of view. They need more qualified leads. That way they can spend more time focusing on accounts that have true potential and cultivating relationships that will profit the organisation’s bottom line. 

Time spent by sales talking to people who are not, or will never become, viable leads can be reduced by implementing automated lead scoring.

Lead scoring helps you to identify prospects that fit your ‘ideal customer criteria’ by analysing information in your CRM. It also tracks a lead’s actions in real time throughout the customer journey and across all channels, measuring when they are ready to purchase and ensuring that sales don’t make contact until a lead is deemed qualified. Once they hit that threshold the system can assign them as opportunity and notify a member of the sales team to follow up while the lead is hot.

Create More Relevant and Timely Emails

Most salespeople lose a lot of time to email, making it a prime candidate for automation. Using email templates, dynamic content and personalisation saves time, sets a quality standard for sales communications and creates a more engaging customer journey.

At its most basic, sales automation allows your company to build up a library of proven and approved ‘canned responses’. Instead of creating each email from scratch, templates allow sales to save time. Every time they have to send a personal email they can simply select, amend and send the ideal message each time. 

However, automation goes much further.

Based on customer expectations, it needs to. Buyers are more sophisticated than they were even five years ago, and expect communication tailored specifically to them. Nothing turns them off more than a “To Whom It May Concern” email. They want to feel heard and understood.

Automation platforms allow for the more targeted and nuanced approach customers expect.

Nurturing workflows send prospects the exact information they need when they need to see it. These can be triggered automatically based on factors such as the customer’s lead score, segmentation and online interactions. They can also diverge based on the prospect’s interactions within the sequence. Sales reps can also interrupt sequences when required, for example if a sale is completed before the sequence ends. 

In addition, personalisation and dynamic content within automated emails, based on a prospect's job title or their location in the customer journey for example, creates the pinpointed, highly relevant messaging customers want.

Streamline to Create Room to Scale

Sales managers need their sales team to be able to focus on what they’re best at: selling!

81% of top sales performers are able to spend 4 hours or more a day on sales-related activities, such as prospecting, taking meetings, presenting and creating proposals. When your team gets sidetracked in admin, both their performance and job satisfaction suffers. However, as tedious as those admin tasks are, we all know how critical they are to an efficient and effective sales operation.

The natural result of an integrated automation platform is the streamlining of your communications and data operations. Logging information into CRM records, following up, and moving the relationship forward becomes seamless with everything in one place.

When all of your data is held centrally, your sales team has the whole picture. A standalone CRM can keep track of previous conversations and purchases so sales can refresh themselves quickly. But a CRM that’s part of an integrated platform allows them to see the totality of the relationship. This includes all of the interactions a prospect has had across your website, email and social.

While some manual entry is unavoidable, automation can help to enhance the data you hold on leads. You can automatically populate fields such as social media profiles to speed up research and outreach. You can also use lead capture forms with dynamic form fields that ask for new information each time your prospect registers for a download.  

Better records and clean data are vital because they reinforce automation’s accuracy and effectiveness. Personalised email campaigns need information such as a contact’s title, industry and geographical area to work from. Identifying the hottest leads in the pipeline from their lead score relies on campaign and website tracking in addition to basic business intelligence.

Automated reminders are another benefit of sales automation software. Sales team members can receive email or text alerts to take key actions, such as following up on a proposal. You can also set up automated workflows that send out instant notifications. For example, when you need to follow up immediately because a prospect has crossed a specific lead score threshold or returned to the website, or a key target has replied to a social media post.

Finally, automated scheduling tools takes the hassle out of booking meetings. Calendar integration keeps bookings organised with other scheduled events and prevents double bookings. Many platforms integrate with popular virtual meeting tools, such as Zoom. You can embed meeting links within invitations and use AI powered transcription services to take minutes if required.

Leverage Your Insights

An automation platform makes tracking analytics easy, saving sales managers time and helping them to perform their job more efficiently. You can track your sales team’s activities and key performance metrics, such as sales team rankings, conversions and pipeline value.

You can also look at opportunities in the sales pipeline visually. This shows the opportunities at different deal stages and allows you assign leads to the salesperson who is the best fit. Data can be filtered by factors such as sales rep, products and campaigns, or track information by account.

Our own pipeline management tools track opportunities through a sales pipeline, providing helpful reminders to keep in touch with prospects and alerting clients if their sales opportunities appear to be going stale. A combination of automated communications with the customer, automated reminders for the team, and automated exception reporting for accounts that urgently need attention helps to make the sales process more efficient.

Robust reports also show marketing and sales analytics together. Knowing how leads respond to every piece of marketing allows managers to analyse which campaigns converted to sales and align their teams efforts for ongoing success.

Why You Need Sales Automation

Turning prospects into customers faster builds business quicker and more productively. B2B organisations need sales automation tools if they want to scale. Generating and nurturing leads with a powerful content strategy is essential, as is decreasing the time sales spends on analysis and administrative tasks. By providing your sales team with automation tools such as email templates, lead capture, lead scoring, and workflow automation, they can focus their energy on their sales strategies and the opportunities in the pipeline.

1827 Marketing can show you how automation can be used to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of both sales and marketing. Contact us today for a demo.