What Is Sales Automation - A Simplified Guide for Your Ease

Table of Contents

1. What is sales automation?
2. Sales Automation CRM
3. What is CRM Automation?
4. Benefits of Sales Automation
5. Automation of the key elements of Sales
   
6.  Get, Set, Go!

Sealing a deal needs a lot of effort. A sales rep connects with multiple prospects to close a deal. A lot of time is spent on understanding a customer's requirements, documenting data, taking notes, and following up. As the list of customers grows, the endless emails, meetings, and phone calls get even more daunting. It gets challenging to manage multiple jobs manually.

Furthermore, some jobs are repetitive and take away a lot of your valuable time. This is why you should consider investing in sales automation. After all, in this era of booming technology, one can always assign a task or two to advanced software. 

What is Sales Automation?

Sales automation automates time-consuming and manual sales tasks using artificial intelligence (A.I.), software, and digitized tools, that helps in better time management for sales reps. A sales automation system takes over some of the responsibilities of managers and sales reps. It makes it easy for the sales team to concentrate on other essential tasks like nurturing leads and building relationships. As per McKinsey, one can easily automate 30% of sales-related activities

A sales automation tool can help you perform tasks like:

·      Automate follow-ups

·      Efficiently train the new sales teammates with a scalable and repeatable system.

·      Manage the sales pipeline.

·      Send across payment reminders and invoices to customers without having awkward conversations.

·      Automate  sales engagement activities to reduce the burden of the sales reps.

Sales Automation CRM

The best sales automation software in particular, is the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. The CRM tool is quite a critical piece of your sales puzzle. It is equivalent to the center of the sales wheel. It directs the spokes of the sales wheel in the correct direction. Without a robust CRM tool, your sales automation responsibilities can fail. 

Deploying a suitable CRM software in your company clearly states that you desire growth. Manual jobs of data keeping and managing spreadsheets cannot support your business to flourish. A CRM tool helps grow your business and makes your life easy. But, it can get complex for your CRM tool as and when your contact list begins to grow. While dealing with big data, tracking the details and data of a specific prospect in question is tricky. Moreover, when your sales team relies on the CRM tool, it must work efficiently all round the clock. In 2020, 61% of businesses indulging in automation witnessed exceeding revenue generation (source: view report).

Now, how can you keep your CRM tool efficient even while your client list grows with each day? Well, the answer is CRM automation.

What is CRM Automation?

CRM automation offers you enhanced productivity and streamlines your process by automating the repetitive tasks in your CRM. CRM aids in streamlining the marketing and sales processes. It helps in sales automation and performs tasks like:

• Syncing data
• Qualifying leads
• Managing email marketing campaigns
• Choosing templates
• Helps facilitate contact and communication between multiple marketing teams
• Scheduling calls

Benefits of sales automation

How does Sales Automation Benefit a Business?

1.     Sales automation services benefit your business in multiple ways. Let us briefly know more about its advantages.

2.     Improves performance and efficiency of the sales team- When you free your sales team from the mundane and redundant tasks, they get to focus well on selling.

3.     Speeds up the sales process - Sales automation solution speeds up the sales process freeing it from the risk of manual errors. 

4.     Enhances customer satisfaction - Automation offers instant responses and speeds up the entire process. You get quicker reactions and more prospects in no time. When you get back to clients quicker, you make them your priority. It makes clients happy, increasing the chances of conversion. 

5.     Increases data consistency - To avoid discrepancy, any organization's data needs to stay consistent throughout. A Sales automation tool helps you do the same.

6.     Saves time - Time is money! Smart choices can help you save time, which can be invested elsewhere. Automation takes responsibility for your mundane jobs and allows you to put your time to use elsewhere. 

7.     Recognize potential customers - A customer-centric approach is a key to closing deals. You can collect customer data and statistics using a suitable sales automation tool. Automation lets potential customers get into the sales funnel who genuinely are interested in your service or product. This data helps the sales team better understand the requirements of the customers. When you know the requirements, you can develop strategies accordingly and pitch them to the clients. Resultantly, you close more deals. 

8.     Helps with customer details - Sales automation tools and software provide you with essential data about the customers. This collected data helps you understand the requirements of the customers better. As a result, you get the upper hand while selling your product. 

9.     Helps build relationships with customers - The sales process involves a lot of redundant activities like regularly interacting with the customers. To maintain a wholesome relationship with your customers, you must stay in touch via emails and reminders. It gets difficult to maintain this manually. Automation tasks like follow-ups and emails can go a long way to maintaining constant relations with your customers.  

10.  Simplifies the process of reporting - To handle team reporting is complex. It is a lengthy and time-consuming process. If you automate the entire process, CRMs can handle reporting. CRMs help you report to managers, and you can avoid creating manual reports. Thus, saving a lot of your valuable time. 

Most of all, online sales automation best suits businesses with smaller teams and limited budgets. With automation taking care of manual tasks, one can better use resources. 

Automation of the key elements of Sales

Sales automation aids in minimizing the workload of the sales reps. It enhances certain aspects of sales and eases your business. Here's how the sales automation system helps to improve aspects of the sales process. 

 Emailing

Sales reps invest ample time in preparing and shooting out emails. You can automate the emails, and your sales rep can save time and invest it elsewhere. By automating emails, you cut them a task, and they can concentrate on one-on-one relationship development with clients. 

You need to get closer details of the day-to-day email tasks for email automation. The daily email jobs include the following:

• Standard emails that sales reps shoot out daily
• Time required to create emails from scratch and editing them
• Amount of image personalization and customization needed as per business. 

Most of the emailing tasks are redundant. This means the sales reps must do the same mundane tasks daily. Sometimes, they do the same task multiple times a day. They even send follow-up emails that consume too much of their valuable time. Some of the many emails that sales reps send daily are:

• Welcome emails
• Reminder emails
• Demo emails
• Thank-you emails

How does the idea of automating the entire emailing process sound to you? You can use emailing templates and automate this step of the sales process. With the help of a sales automation tool, you can easily create email sequences with associated follow-ups. Such automation tools also allow you to personalize your emails with minimum manual work. In addition, you can also track the insights like 'clicks' and 'opens' of the emails. Therefore, you get an in-depth understanding of how your email campaigns perform. 

 Lead Prioritization

The sales process comprises several steps, and lead generation is one of the beginner steps. While generating leads, you might be flooded with prospects. It gets tough to filter out the genuinely interested clients from the entire lot. Hence, the question arises, how would you know which prospect is genuinely interested and would convert? 

In such a scenario, the sales automation system comes to your rescue. Some lead scoring tools work on artificial intelligence and serve your purpose. It helps to prioritize leads and enables the sales team to work with potential clients. All you need to do is, create a model of your ideal clients and mention them to the score leads. 

Sales automation helps to prioritize leads, and your sales team can save time. This feature is helpful for businesses and companies that face longer sales cycles with low conversion rates. Longer cycles and lower conversions result from spending too much time and resources on uninterested clients. 

With the right CRM software, the lead generation process can be effortless. Zixflow helps you automate the lead generation process and build healthy relations with your customers. To know more about the lead generation process with Zixflow, click here.

 Lead Enrichment

Knowledge is the base of actions. The more information you have, the more power you possess. The more details you have about the prospect's industry, company size, responsibilities, solutions, current vendors, and social media presence, the easier it gets to connect with them. You can leave a positive impact on your client when you approach them with already knowing so much about them. Ultimately, you get a step closer to building relationships and closing a deal. Multiple lead enrichment tools available in the market would help you gather data. 

 Lead Distribution

Spontaneous responses are always heart winners. When you approach a client as soon as they sign up, there are high chances of you cracking a conversation. However, that is not usually possible as you get leads from multiple channels, including social media platforms, blog posts, websites, etc. It takes time to assign the prospect client to the sales department. Spotting a prospective client and handling them in the sales department can take too long. This time gap is not suitable for business. Approaching the client after a time gap might make them lose interest or have already spoken to a competitor. You can automate the lead distribution and cut short the response time. Using suitable automation software, it becomes easy to assign leads to the sales reps based on the kind of industry, location, company size, etc. 

Scheduling Meetings 

When a sales representative approaches a lead, and things go well, the following step is to schedule a meeting with the prospective client. Scheduling a meeting is difficult, as finding a common time slot can be difficult. On some occasions, the prospect might not be free, and on others, the sales rep might not be able to dedicate time. This trivial issue might sound unprofessional and offend your client. This is precisely why you should automate the process of scheduling a meeting. Various sales automation tools help the sales rep schedule meetings. Your sales would send a link to schedule a meeting with the client, and they can pick their preferred time slot for the same. In case you do not want an all-in-one CRM software, you can choose to invest in a stand-alone tool.

Reporting

Sales managers conduct ample daily tasks and manage the entire sales team. They spend a reasonable amount of time creating reports and sharing them with their team via emails. Creating and sharing reports is essential to keep the team notified and motivated. Every team member is aware of how things are proceeding in the sales pipeline and can estimate the output.

Generating a report involves tabulation and manual data entry. It takes up a lot of time. Also, data is always a scope of errors when manually documenting data. It can produce erroneous reports. Thus, by automating the report generation process, you ensure error-free reporting along with saving ample time. Also, there can be multiple reports created in a short period. One can choose a CRM or a reporting automation tool for generating email reports. 

Get, Set, Go!

With sales automation by your side, you can strive to achieve more on an average working day than usual. In sales, AI adoption is forecasted to grow by 139% between 2020 and 2023 per Salesforce. To witness the results, you must implement the changes and see your company work towards success. You can determine the best sales automation software and let it work wonders to produce efficiency and conversions. Sales automation is the best gift you can present to your sales team that would share their responsibilities, offer them a clear path, and help fetch conversions in a shorter time.

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