Gone are those days when marketing in the digital world was considered a tedious task, and people used to rely on spreadsheets and notepads for everything. But after the advancement of technology, now you can automate the complete sales process without influencing the quality of marketing efforts. Let’s read about Sales automation.
A recent survey of HubSpot found that approximately 42% of marketers now consider automation a top priority in business. So in case you are a savvy decision-maker, automation must be your priority.
In the sales process, several tasks are repetitive, but you have to do them to keep the cycle running. For instance, the sales managers have a particular set of tasks to complete, while the sales reps have a different set.
Apart from being tedious, these repetitive tasks consume the time and efficiency of everyone who requires them to perform them. Sure, everything would crumble to a halt without doing them, but many of them don’t require human interaction at all.
What is Sales Automation?
Sales automation takes all of those time-consuming tasks executed every day, week, or month, other tasks triggered by a specific event, and run them for you.
It makes everything (and everyone) more productive and directly related to the revenue produced by the sales team. And don’t forget to consider human error, which gets eliminated by sales automation and marketing automation engines.
5 Key Components for Sales Automation
Sales processes proffer the team to build a game plan to translate leads into customers. When you have the relevant tools in place, you can organize the prospects and make sure that you reach out at the right time.
It eases your sales team to develop strong relationships with the customers, which would last years to come. Sadly, the sales process takes more time than anticipated as the process requires tedious tasks costing the company.
For instance, the time spent composing emails or logging sales notes could be utilized to search for more high-quality prospects. Hence, automating these tasks would assist the company saves both the time of the sales reps and the company’s cost.
Here are a few methods to utilize automation to streamline the sales process.
1. Automated Communication
Today, owning an automated communication system becomes one of the most critical aspects to prosper in any business. This communication involves voicemails, meeting scheduling tools, email, personal email sequence, etc.
- Automated Voicemails encourage the agents to pre-record a message at their convenience for the customers or leads when the representative is unable to answer the phone. It saves the representative from coming up with replies on the spot and giving excellent customer support.
- Meeting Scheduling tools support the sales reps to quickly and conveniently schedule meetings based on the calendar data.
- Personal email sequences list drip campaigns which make the work of the sales professional easier.
- Sales email automation keeps track of inactive users’ unsubscribing email addresses from email lists without any manual intervention by the sales executive.
Interaction between the company and its consumers is the most important factor that encourages the business to retain customers. When the transmission is smooth, customers feel happy with the service and recommend many other people about the product and services.
In addition, these automated tools enable the company to handle a large customer base without requiring the sales executives to perform many tasks manually. This makes the sales rep’s work-life more comfortable and benefits the company by retaining existing customers, hence enhancing the sales process.
2. Scoring Leads and Prioritizing Them
The sales process is tiresome as all the leads generated are not equal. Several people may want to purchase the product or service today. But few are not intrigued by buying. If the sales reps handle each lead equally, they are misusing their time.
They also could not separate which lead is valuable and which would not yield any results. This is the reason a lead scoring system would come into the picture. This system encourages the team members to recognize a potential lead and when it is time to equate to this lead.
This scoring system is entirely based on the individual’s actions, such as engaging with content, reading an email, or associating with the company in any way. Therefore, when an individual does any such activity, specific points are allotted to the leads.
These points gather and notify the sales team about the possible leads to make a purchase. The leads with the maximum score are prioritized, and less interested leads go further down the leads. The scoring system allocates scores to actions based on their importance to the lead nurturing process. This automated feature improves the sales process by making it valuable and fruitful.
3. Artificial Intelligence-Based Sales Bots
Businesses have begun competing with each other digitally with the aid of artificial intelligence sales bots. Small-scale businesses that prioritize translating leads consumers to expand their business and employ AI to help them out. Here are a few ways which you should consider:
3.1) Enhanced Customer experience: By utilizing AI chatbots, companies have enhanced their customer experience by applying these methods:
- Personalized Packaging: AI chatbots assist in personalizing every customer where everyone is given attention. With human reps, it becomes challenging to cater to this attention.
- Fixing problems: Chatbots are proactive as they rectify problems before customers realize that any problem exists.
3.2) Content Curation via Email: It becomes nearly impracticable to personalize emails to customers when they have many clients. Companies communicate with emails to consumers by sending them weekly or monthly outlets.
In this situation, AI algorithms can prepare the subscribers’ email browsing data to evaluate how individuals have interacted with your content. Based on this information, AI can direct customers’ personalized emails, which improves the company’s appeal.
4. Advancement of Leads
When the sales reps just have the lead’s name or job title, it will not be sufficient to close the high-end sale. The rep requires to have more information to make a genuine connection with the customer to sign the contract.
Getting this information takes time and effort, and reps can simply spend hours of the day exploring insights about specific companies.
By utilizing lead enrichment tools, companies can easily extract information about the leads and their companies. This gives the reps a comprehensive and accurate profile of the company they are seeking to connect with.
However, you do not need to automate the lead enrichments fully. Instead, it should be an ongoing process that you should develop continuously.
A CRM supports the team keeps the prospect’s profiles updated and organized as they understand more about any company. Furthermore, a pro tip is that other members should also create the same lead profile.
So that everyone works together to create a complete image of every individual, and a comprehensive plan could be made.
5. Organizing Sales Team
Once sales automation is implemented, sales managers could easily locate customer-related data, sales figures, customer complaints, and sales rep activities. These details support the management to organize teams and make decisions with agility and in-depth and real-time data when it comes to measuring success.
Consequently, the sales process becomes active, and the sales team can use a centralized system to manage frameworks such as organizing and storing data using automated sales processes.
Steps Required in Automating the Sales Process
Step 1: Define Your goals
Constantly define a measurable goal such as a visitor scheduling a meeting or scheduling a demo for a SaaS vendor.
Step 2: Mapping the customer journey
Mapping out the customer’s complete journey and directing the bot to take proper action could help the team take the next course of action for the customer.
Step 3: Classify the customers who opt out of chat.
Segment the customers based on their behavior, usage, location, individual profiles, and visitors who opt out of chat and send them a personalized and targeted message.
Step 4: Recognize and assign tasks to people who would take the process forward
Once the conversation with leads has moved forward, identify, and consider the best individuals who would handle the tasks and lead the process.
Step 5: Executing the process
Once the sales bot is processed, the process of implementation would be the next step. Lastly, use the A/B testing to assess the performance of the sales bot.
Step 6: Analyzing the results
Consider utilizing factors such as revenue goal and conversion to quantify the sales bot performance. And analyze where the automation serves and where human interaction matters.
Step 7: Estimating the value
Make total usage of sales automation by recognizing the potential phases of the sales lifecycle where automation can be combined.
Conclusion
Automating the sales process becomes an essential factor that makes the sales rep’s job more manageable. Automation also allows companies to perform better as it supports the sales team to improve their productivity.
In today’s world, for the business to develop, grow, and sustain customers, automation tools have become essential elements. Understanding how to automate the business’s sales process and execute it in the given steps helps businesses flourish and sustain in their industry.
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