As a business owner or sales manager, you know the traditional sales process is slow, cumbersome, and not so effective. You have to do it all by yourself or assign resources to do the repetitive tasks. The good news is that you can relieve yourself and your sales reps of the recurring tasks by automating the sales process. All you need is a reliable sales automation manager to take care of the most time-consuming part of your job.
What is Sales Funnel Automation?
A sales funnel is a marketing term that highlights potential customers’ journeys while making a purchase. The steps involved in a sales funnel are the top, middle, and bottom. However, these steps vary depending on the sales model of a company.
To explain it in simpler words, we can imagine a regular funnel that we usually use to pour any liquid into a bottle. While pouring a liquid, it enters the top of the funnel and makes its way to the narrower part of the funnel. Then, it comes out from the narrowest part of the funnel, resulting in a filled bottle.
The bottle is your business in the sales world, and your main objective is to fill it with potential customers. Prospects begin at the funnel’s top and make their way down the funnel before becoming loyal customers.
However, not everything that enters the top guarantees to come out of the bottom with the sales funnel. Business owners know the pain of missing sales. After numerous efforts to attract potential customers throughout the week, prospects drop out of the funnel without purchasing.
It happens. However, if you have a funnel management team, there are significantly fewer chances that your company will experience something similar. Many small businesses’ sales funnels are like sieves with holes left by sticky notes, forgotten follow-ups, and missed appointments.
Several types of funnel-building software tools exist, but AutoResponders, sign-up forms, and scheduling software are the most helpful, depending on your funnel and business. The most significant advantage of sales automation is that it allows you to generate more revenue with less manual work from your sales team and filters unqualified leads.
Why Should You Start Doing Sales Automation Immediately?
One of the common questions we get to hear from sales managers and business owners is: why do we need sales automation? Automation is an excellent method to boost productivity, increase conversions and sales, and eliminate monotonous tasks, such as handling excel sheets. It can save you thousands of work hours that your sales team can use to nurture relationships with leads by using landscape sales techniques. Sales automation can boost productivity by 14.5 percent and cut marketing overheads by 12.2 percent.
A reliable sales automation software will take charge of the time-consuming tasks within the sales process, such as data collection, lead prospecting, and email marketing. Sales proposal automation is yet another useful feature of a good automation system.
With an automated process in place, you can rest assured that your sales tasks are running in the background while you focus on other essential aspects of your business. On top of that, sales automation eliminates costly human error that can otherwise affect your bottom line. While business automation CE can boost productivity, it is not a replacement for human interaction. You still have to interact with qualified leads to close sales.
What Aspects of Your Sales Process Should be Automated?
Email Marketing
Sales representatives use 21 percent of their daily time to write emails. This makes for a big chunk of their work. Wouldn’t it be more productive if they spent this time interacting with prospects? Automating your email marketing can make this possible. In fact, email marketing automation can increase your efficiency to get leads by 451 percent.
Unlike blast email, email automation allows you to segment your target audience, create workflows, and set up triggered emails. A sales rep can use the automation tool to automatically customize and schedule a string of emails at preset intervals for different prospects. The system will automatically send out those emails at the set intervals. Once a prospect responds, you can remove the lead from the sequence so that the system does not send them more automated emails.
Lead Prospecting
When you look at the definition of sales cycle and the sales cycles stages, you will know that lead prospecting is one of the most time-consuming and tedious steps in the sales funnel. Fortunately, sales automation tools allow you to automate lead nurturing and qualification. Automated prospecting would work alongside your sales reps to find new prospects more effectively. It would automatically create an ideal list of leads and then engage, follow-up, qualify, and schedule appointments with them through email and chat.
If you are using LinkedIn for B2B sales, it is a good idea to use LinkedIn Plugins to save time and automate your sales process. Also, you need to follow your B2B sales strategy to get the most from LinkedIn. There are many different third-party automation tools, chrome extensions, and CRM software, such as Clearbit Automation, out there that promise to make your tasks easier. But not all of the tools are made equal. It is vital to choose a reliable and proven tool to achieve your sales objectives.
It’s worth considering LinkedIn automation tool like Octopus CRM to automate and organize your sales process, building lead generation funnels on LinkedIn besides managing your monthly sales cycles.
Daily Tasks
Data entry, scheduling appointments, invoice generation, report generation…you name it. These tasks are overwhelming and consume much of a sales rep’s time. A good sales automation software will let you automate these tasks. For example, it will automatically do research on leads, log calls and data into the lead profiles, make appointments through calendar invites, and generate reports. Think about the time and resources saved on these tasks!
What is a Sales Automation Tool?
Sales automation tool helps eliminate repetitive, manual tasks and automates tasks to allow your sales team to focus more on generating revenue.
Related article: Best Sales Automation Tools for Small Business
While using the sales automation tool, you can:
- Build a sales pipeline
- Automate follow-ups
- Train new sales team with an efficient system
- Send invoices to clients
- Send payment reminders
Combining sales automation with marketing automation and AI becomes a powerful tool that allows your business to grow more efficiently. Discover ways B2B sales teams can use ChatGPT in their job.
The main objective of the sales automation tool is to eliminate manual tasks of the sales team that they perform repetitively. It reduces the time spent performing these tasks and interacts with new and current customers. Since the sales automation tool eliminates manual data entry, it also reduces the chances of errors while inserting data.
Popular sales automation tools are:
- Dripify
- HubSpot Sales
- Pipedrive
Following are some features that the sale automation tool includes:
Interaction mapping
It provides users with a historical view of prospect’s interactions with the brand
Contact management
The software provides users to automate lead nurturing emails
Order management
It automates order fulfillment, tracking, and shipping.
Sales forecasting
Artificial intelligence (AI) creates financial projections and Pro-forma sales.
Employee performance evaluation
A sales automation tool provides management to record all activities performed by sales agents.
Get Started with Sales Automation!
While sales automation can make your life easier, it takes a powerful CRM to achieve your sales goals. Sales automation done right can streamline your sales process and save you enough time that you can use to interact with prospects. Automate your sales process now and see the results for yourself.