Sales automation refers to a software tool that automates routine manual sales tasks, thereby enhancing efficiency
Any sales professional will tell you that there are a number of repetitive tasks in the overall sales process. These tasks are unavoidable to keep the sales cycle running smoothly. These tasks differ according to hierarchy within the sales team.
Not only are these tasks time-consuming and repetitive in nature, they can also be potentially boring. Moreover, they tend to drain the time, efficiency, and energy of all the team members. While these tasks are important and crucial to the sales process, not all of them require human interaction.
With a powerful sales automation software tool, all of these time-consuming tasks may be triggered by a certain event and made to run daily, weekly, or even monthly, so cumulatively, it saves you time, energy, and increases your efficiency, also allowing you to focus on other core tasks such as personalized customer interaction, qualifying and nurturing leads, and generally improving the sales process. Moreover, this has a direct effect on the revenue generated by the sales team. Finally, and very importantly, the scope of human error is fully eliminated by sales automation engines.
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It is evident that repetitive tasks that are manually performed every day eat into the sales team's productivity and time, thereby diverting their energies from actual core sales activities. This, in turn, leads to reduced sales and conversion rates. With sales automation software, businesses can eliminate this wastage of resources and help your sales team to get back on track and plan strategies and implement them, instead of performing repetitive tasks.
From identifying new opportunities to delivering customer happiness
Identifying potential leads and customers is a time-consuming process for sales teams. This lengthy process of customer identification inadvertently eats into the time that the team could have spent interacting with actual customers. A powerful and effective sales automation tool automatically identifies customers and leads quickly with the help of different metrics. This saves them time by enabling them to make customer contact faster and helps them engage with them to facilitate purchasing decisions. Businesses that often end up wasting precious time and resources on customer identification may, with the help of sales automation, simply automate the process for expedited results.
Without a clear understanding of the customers' needs, the development of sales strategy is futile. Creating informed sales campaigns based on customer demographics and other relevant information goes a long way towards meeting sales goals. Rich insights about target audiences provided by reliable sales automation software can help design targeted campaigns and, in turn, help drive up conversion rates and enhance growth.
Some of the important tasks for a sales team include writing reports and documenting sales activities. Nevertheless, these activities are extremely time-consuming, thereby leaving little time to focus on performing other core activities. An effective sales automation software tool automatically creates relevant reports and saves you precious time to focus on other activities that cannot be automated. So effectively, with sales automation software, you will have more time for your sales team to engage your customer and give them personalized and undivided attention and also enhance inter-departmental communication and collaboration.
Keeping leads warm is all about right timing. So whether you are writing an email or calling a customer over the phone, it needs to be done at the right times. Automating the follow-up process ensures that your leads are automatically tracked, followed, and kept warm. With a good sales automation tool, you can easily automate customer communication and be in touch with your customers at all times. However, not all communication should be automated, the personalized human touch is also necessary.
Analysis of customer communication such as emails and calls for the purpose of understanding customer needs and delivering personalized service is crucial for any sales team. Effective CRM tools offer valuable features that give you insights to help you track how open rates, click rates, time of interaction, and more. In contrast to time consuming and tiresome manual analysis, sales automation software accurately tells you how you can improve your email communication to enhance revenue growth. Moreover, it also provides actionable insights from social media communication and that is extremely helpful to design an effective sales strategy as well. A good CRM solution allows you to automate all of these, generate relevant reports and put it all in context.
One of the core benefits of sales automation software is that it offers rich, actionable insights you can easily access. Furthermore, with breakthrough technology such as predictive analysis, big data and artificial intelligence, the accuracy of these insights scale up to a whole new level. These technologies amplify analysis for sales automation tools and help sales teams predict exactly what they need to do in order to boost sales and enhance overall business growth.
Enabling your sales department to be efficient is key to achieving business growth. Gaining competitive edge over other businesses in the same niche will be vital to your survival and success as a business. In comes automation. Automating your sales activities will help your sales team to focus on other core focus areas such as customer interaction, etc. Insights gained from automation analysis can also help you understand your competitors' strategy better, and help you design your own strategy accordingly. In other words, sales automation enables a competitive edge which, in turn, helps to accelerate business growth as well.
Activities such as reports generation and forecasting take up a lot of time if done manually. Automation of sales forecasting is definitely recommended since it is completely based on numbers and metrics, and so naturally, accuracy is better with automation. Automated sales forecasts are quick, accurate, and organized. Moreover, these forecasts may also be shared across departments, and disparate data can be integrated for more actionable insights. A perfect example of this is a generation of sales forecasts based on marketing and sales data combined.
Assign leads automatically, based on geographical attributes, product type, source, or a mix of similar criteria, by setting up rules. Moreover, automatic re-assigning of leads to different sales team members is also possible, if no action has been taken for the lead within a set time frame.
Alert salespeople and create tasks for them by setting up automated rules based on important events e.g. Alert a sales representative and initiate a follow-up task if a lead spends longer than 2 minutes on the company's pricing page.
Send out a notification to the sales managers automatically in the event of an important sales activity or inaction on a salesperson’s part e.g. Notifying the manager when a positive sales interaction has taken place but there have been no follow-up on the lead since the last 14 days.
Missing a couple of sales calls is not unusual at times, considering that your salespeople are busy. EngageBay's sales automation software captures all missed calls as leads, and automatically re-assigns them to another sales representative in a looping pattern, or based on rules you define.
Assigning higher quality scores to leads with specific attributes is possible by setting up relevant rules. This combination of quality score and lead activity scoring is helpful for dynamically creating lists of leads that should be followed up with, on priority, enhancing your overall team efficiency.
Get your sales reports delivered to your inbox at your preferred frequency. You can opt to receive multiple reports such as task completion reports, revenue targets, sales performance, reports about funnel status, etc.
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If you’ve yet to really master sales automation to streamline the sales cycle, a new year is as good a time as any to acquaint yourself with useful sales automation software. Whether you’re learning about sales automation for the first time and need definitions and best practices or you’re trying to improve your sales automation, you’ve come to the right place.
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Got Questions? We are here to answer them
While one may find an overlap in many of the features and functions of sales automation software and customer management software (CRM), the main element of difference between them is where they fit in, into the sales process. Basically, CRM software manages all the information and the historical data of contacts inclusive of customer interaction since the beginning, while sales automation software automates and optimizes the overall sales process, making the work of the sales team easier.
The importance of the different features of sales automation software is entirely dependent on a business's needs. Nevertheless, some of the most widely-used features include:
All those tasks in the sales process that are repetitive may be automated through sales automation software. This includes, but not restricted to important activities such as sending emails to customers and scheduling meetings. Some other processes include:
It must be understood that small businesses are continuously exposed to severe competition. By investing in sales automation software, these businesses can stay ahead of the game at all times by enhancing the productivity of their team members. While minor tasks such as following-up with customers and responding to leads are crucial, they can also be highly time-consuming. The automating of the sales process systems takes the drain away from your employees’ time so they may direct their focus on activities that result in higher conversion rates.
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