Last updated - July 8, 2021
It is the priority of virtually every company to close as many sales deals as possible. However, many businesses continue to rely on outdated processes that hinder them from achieving their sales goals. If this sounds like you, it’s time to embrace sales automation to avoid being left behind by your competition.
Sales process automation enables your team to focus on pursuing the right opportunities instead of wasting time doing tedious and routine tasks. Besides, it increases the productivity and efficiency of your workforce while also facilitating reduced overall business costs.
So, how do you go about automating your sales process? The following seven key aspects are a great place to start;
Prospecting
The success of any sales process depends majorly on the manner in which a company finds its qualified prospects. Usually, the prospecting stage can be time-consuming but highly rewarding when done correctly.
To speed up the process, try to minimise manual prospecting especially now that there’s no shortage of great tools to automate the tasks involved here.
For example, if you regularly use LinkedIn to find clients, it’s likely that you’ve considered paying for or even used the platform’s premium option. It comes with additional features like the ability to set up a custom filter to help you get more accurate prospecting results. Besides, you can choose the frequency with which the platform sends you email alerts; ranging from daily, weekly, to monthly alerts. This way, you’ll be getting prequalified list of prospects on a regular basis without you having to do the searches manually.
Other tools you can use at this step include email finders like Hunter.io and VoilaNobert to assist you in finding emails of crucial leads from the web. Once you have sufficient details of your prospects, go ahead and reach out to them; this Hubspot Outlook integration by PieSync will help to improve communication with your prospects particularly if you use Hubspot as your CRM software.
Lead enrichment
It’s often said that knowledge is power. The more information you gather about your prospects, the easier it gets to connect with them and earn their trust. Knowing your prospect’s job title, the company they currently work in, their responsibilities, social media presence, and so on makes it much easier for you to successfully complete more sales deals.
To help you do this, you need lead enrichment tools. These tools enable you to gather information from multiple sources so that you can create a perfect profile of your prospect. Some of the best ones to use here include Clearbit, Pipl, and BeenVerified among others.
Email templates creation
To increase the open and response rates of your emails, it’s important that you personalize a good deal of the content you write to your prospects.
Avoid copy pasting messages or using the same unchanged templates over and over again. Sure, you need to have a general email template that contains the main content you regularly send to prospects or subscribers. However, to get more success with your prospecting campaigns, you need to customise the actual emails based on the profile of the recipient.
To create effective email templates, consider using services like Prospect.io or OnePageCRM’s email template builder.
Contact creation
If you’re adding new contacts to your CRM by hand, it’s time to stop it and automate this usually tedious task. For example, you can use a marketing software to create and edit records for leads that meet a particular pre-set combination of criteria. In your case, a lead can be defined as ‘qualified’ if they visit your landing page or watch your product video etc.
To enhance this process, be sure to integrate different lead sources with your CRM. This could range from survey respondents, webinar participants, event attendees, new email subscribers, and Facebook lead ads respondents among others.
Email automation
If you’re into email marketing, the first and possibly the most important tool you need to invest in is an autoresponder. This tool helps you automate your email campaign by sending multiple emails to your clients in a predetermined sequence. Of course, you’ll find numerous autoresponders on the market, but most work pretty much the same; helping you choose the emails to send, when to send, and also allow for personalization. Besides, in the event your prospect doesn’t respond to any of your emails, you can choose to stop contacting them at a certain point.
Scheduling meetings
A lot has changed over the years regarding how meetings and calls are scheduled today. With the numerous plugins and tools available to help you automate this task, you no longer need to manually email prospects asking them the best time to organise a meeting with them. Scheduling tools such as Calendly and Doodle allow you to effectively communicate with your leads by allowing them to indicate the times on a day or several days when they’re available to meet you.
Reporting
Sales reporting has always been a painful and clunky procedure for most account managers. To this date, a big number of companies still do it manually using Outlook and Microsoft Excel to store crucial leads and customer data. Expectedly, this is regarded as a significant time waster and a reason most businesses never reach their maximum potential.
Luckily, sales reporting can be automated in ost CRM software available on the market today. Some like Zoho Analytics and Salesforce CRM can even schedule sales reports to be sent to your email on a daily basis. This makes it easy to track your progress and also enables you to portray your organisational skills when implementing your project.
Bottom Line
Automating your sales process doesn’t have to be difficult. You don’t even need to acquire the many tools mentioned in this post overnight to achieve business success. Begin by assessing your business to find out the processes that needs immediate attention based on their importance in your overall sales strategy. You can also choose to get a powerful CRM that touches on several areas of your business like emailing, collection of customer data, and reporting among others.
