Meet Hannah
Hannah is a new sales manager at a small startup. Although she’s only been on the job for a handful of days, she can already tell that her reps are worn thin. They’re struggling to manage their workload. Tasks like building prospect lists, logging calls, and scheduling appointments leave little time for selling.
To get her team focused on what they do best—closing deals with customers—Hannah wants the startup to consider sales automation. Sales automation could rescue her team from tedious tasks by mechanising processes such as data entry and scheduling.
In this lesson, you’ll learn exactly what sales automation entails, why it’s beneficial, and if it’s time to implement it on your own team. Then we’ll check back with Hannah to learn five parts of her team’s sales process that she wants to automate.
Watch this video to learn about sales automation, why it’s beneficial, and five ways to automate your sales process.
What Is Sales Automation?
Sales automation standardises and mechanises manual and repetitive sales tasks using software or other digital platforms. Think of it as putting parts of your sales process on autopilot. With sales automation, reps no longer have to spend hours each week on follow-up emails, lead prioritisation, and other labour-intensive (though important) administrative work. Instead, they’re free to develop relationships with customers and guide them across the finish line.
Why Sales Automation Is Beneficial
Beyond saving time and increasing productivity, sales automation has other benefits. Easier customer tracking, forecasting with improved accuracy, and consistency in the buyer experience can also result from sales automation. Explore the flashcards below to learn more.
Hover over each card to reveal more information.
Tap on each card to reveal more information.
Tracking
Tracking
Forecasting
Forecasting
Consistency
Consistency
The bottom line: Sales automation is essential for any company that wants to increase sales team productivity and results. Automation streamlines manual tasks, freeing reps to focus on customers.
Is Sales Automation Right for Your Team?
Now that you know what sales automation is and why it’s beneficial, you can decide if it’s right for your team. If you have a small team or are just starting out, you may be hesitant to invest in a new tool. Or, if you’re comfortable with the way your team currently does things, you might prefer hiring more reps to increase output rather than integrating new technology into your sales process.
However, before you write off sales automation, consider the following situations where reps often lose time in the sales process. Check off each statement that’s true for your sales team in the checklist below.
My salespeople:
- Identify leads by looking through social media platforms, like LinkedIn.
- Manually input leads into a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
- Follow up on leads in alphabetical order rather than according to the best fit.
- Have lost sales because they forgot to follow up.
- Spend significant time every day writing emails and leaving voicemails.
- Go back and forth with customers to schedule product demonstrations and other calendar items.
- Complain that they can’t find the right resource or content when they need it.
If you checked off any (or all!) of the items above, your team could likely benefit from sales automation. Teams of all sizes and experience levels fall prey to time-wasting to-dos, and hiring more employees doesn’t always fix the issue. By taking on repetitive, manual work for your team, automation can minimise those problem areas.
Pause and Reflect
Can you think of any other problem areas in your sales process? Make a mental list of tasks costing your reps valuable time they could be using to interact with potential customers.
When you’re ready to move on, scroll down.
5 Ways to Automate Your Sales Process
Were you able to come up with additional problem areas in your sales process? Hannah, the sales manager we met earlier, has identified five areas in her team’s sales process that could benefit from automation.
Expand the rows below to learn about each one.
List-Building
Before a rep can make a sale, they need a list of potential customers. Customers don’t always show up on their own, which means sales reps—often with the help of marketing—have to actively build their own contact list. One of the main ways Hannah’s reps find potential customers is by scouring social networks online. This manual list-building, however, can be a time-consuming process.
To streamline her team’s efforts, Hannah is considering the implementation of a list-building automation tool. Her reps would be able to input criteria (for example, location, industry, and job title) and get potential matches as the tool searches databases and social media platforms for individuals who meet the designated criteria.
Caution: No list-building automation tool is perfect. Your reps might end up with leads who don’t actually fit the requirements well. Reps should always do additional research to verify a lead’s company, job title, and other information when using these tools.
Lead Prioritisation
Next, Hannah is looking at the potential for automating her team’s lead prioritisation process.
After building a list of leads, Hannah’s reps must determine who to contact first. Some leads are more likely to buy than others. But how do reps know which ones to prioritise?
Lead scoring, common in many CRM tools, assigns customers a score based on their actions. For example, if a lead reads an email, engages on your website, or interacts with your company in any other way, they earn a specific number of points.
Points accumulate, so the leads who have the highest scores (or completed specific tasks) are given priority. Less-engaged leads move further down the list.
Scheduling
Scheduling is another problem area that Hannah’s identified.
Unfortunately, we’re all familiar with the time-sucking communication that happens when trying to set up a meeting or phone call. You suggest a time—the other party suggests something different—and, before you know it, days or even weeks have passed.
In sales, time is of the essence. If too much time passes when trying to nail down a meeting, a potential customer may lose interest. Even worse, they may find an alternative product or service to buy.
Hannah wants to implement a scheduling tool to streamline this process. With a scheduling tool, her reps can simply share a link to a list of available time slots, and a potential customer can choose the time that works best for them.
Email
Even though Hannah’s team is small, they have a lot of potential customers expecting email follow-up. These follow-up emails can be time-consuming to create, however, and there’s always a risk that a buyer might fall through the cracks. Failing to follow up can mean a lost sale.
To avoid this, Hannah is looking at tools to help automate her team’s email process. An automation tool would allow Hannah’s reps to create a handful of email templates one time. Reps could then personalise those templates and send them automatically based on specific criteria. For example, if a customer inquires about a product through an online form, that individual would automatically receive a specific sequence of personalised emails. Additional actions could halt the emails, enter the lead into a different email flow, or trigger some other outcome.
Content Management
Finally, Hannah’s reps are struggling to find content that can help them land potential customers. Because the team’s content is housed in various places, sales reps don’t always know what’s available or if they’re looking at the most up-to-date resource. As a result, they spend extensive time creating content on their own and manually personalising existing resources to fit customers’ needs.
To streamline the process, as well as increase customer engagement, Hannah wants to use an automation tool that can identify, suggest, and personalise content. These tools use a potential customer’s persona, stage in the sales process, location, industry, and other criteria to customise content. That way, reps don’t have to worry about finding or personalising content, saving them time. It can also result in a more consistent buyer experience overall.
With so many potential ways to use technology to streamline the sales process, moving toward automation may sound intimidating. It doesn’t have to be. By tackling your team’s specific challenges with tools that address them, you can raise your team’s efficiency and productivity significantly.
Summary
Sales automation frees salespeople to focus on selling, rather than spending time on manual tasks. List-building, lead prioritisation, scheduling, follow-up emails, and content management are among the workflows that automation can streamline and standardise. Other benefits of sales automation include easier customer tracking, improved accuracy in forecasting, and consistency in the buyer experience.
- Be careful not to over-automate. You know that saying, “Too much of a good thing”? If you automate every aspect of your sales process, your buyer’s experience will feel robotic. Focus on those areas that cost your team valuable time when they could be talking to potential customers instead.
So, you’ve developed a sales process for your team. Next, you’ll want to employ effective strategies to get results. Continue to the next lesson to learn about common sales methodologies.
Click on “Mark Complete ✓“.
