What Is Sales Automation?
Do you know that the majority of the tasks in the sales process are time-consuming and repetitive? In reality, it becomes too difficult to handle everything manually. Because of this, sales automation is a must-have.
In point of fact, businesses that employ automation in their sales processes receive 16% more leads than those that do not. If you want the same results, you have to join the league. In any case, in this day and age of technology, using tools that help you is the right thing to do.
Automation is a software that automates the repetitive tasks of a customer journey. Software for email marketing, lead generation, and CRM frequently include some type of basic automation as a feature.
Using software, artificial intelligence, and digital tools, sales automation is the process of automating manual and time-consuming sales tasks. It makes it a whole lot easier for the sales team to concentrate on more important tasks like nurturing leads and forming relationships.
What are the benefits of using automations?
Even at its most basic form, it automates simple, fundamental tasks that are often repetitive.
Basic automation tools digitize repetitive tasks with little to no coding, helping to eliminate human error, establish consistency, and dramatically increase sales conversion rates.
Over 30% of sales related activity can be automated.
The automation of routine tasks is one of the major global economic trends. One of the most promising functions in terms of the potential for automation is sales, according to cross-functional research by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), which found that approximately a third of tasks related to sales and sales operations can be easily automated with the help of current technology.
For instance, by automating outreach to customers in the sales funnel, sales automation has the potential to unlock additional revenue and reduce sales costs by freeing up time spent on administration and reporting.
Automation Is Critical To Growth
Automation tailored to sales operations is a win for entrepreneurs, small businesses, customers, and sales reps. Here’s how to make it work.
By automating outreach to customers in the sales funnel, sales automation has the potential to unlock additional revenue and reduce sales costs by freeing up time spent on administration and reporting. However, a lot of decision-makers are either unaware of the value that sales automation can bring to a growing number of use cases or have not taken advantage of it.
In order to capitalize on the upcoming opportunity, sales organizations will need to modify their operational procedures as well as their technology platforms in order to guarantee that automation solutions and sales representatives will cooperate.
Early adopters of sales automation frequently point to an increase in the amount of time spent interacting with customers, a higher level of customer satisfaction, efficiency gains of 10 to 15 percent, and the potential for a 10 percent increase in sales.
Other benefits of automation include a 10 to 15% reduction in overall costs and a one to two hour reduction turnaround time—from confirmed order to confirmed delivery—compared to two to three days.
Sales representatives' selling time can be increased by 15 to 20% with this solution, as can deal flow transparency and conversion. Customer management can re-engage potential customers stuck in the purchasing funnel with chatbots, which creates new opportunities without requiring additional human effort. The bot selects customers on its own, communicates with them via text message or email, employs natural language processing to comprehend the context of their responses, and responds appropriately to encourage conversion.
The majority of the sales process can be enhanced by software in the following ways:
Email Marketing
Virtual agents and robotic process automation can be used to reimagine the customer journey and establish a streamlined online ordering, tracking, reputation management and query management process.
Writing and sending emails take up a significant portion of the day for sales representatives.By automating the email tasks, the sales representatives can take a break and concentrate on more important activities like interacting with prospects and building relationships.
Examine the routine tasks associated with emailing before getting started with email automation.The following are all included in this:
a) The typical daily emails sent by representatives
b) The amount of time needed to compose and edit emails and
c) the amount of image personalization and customization that is required.
The majority of tasks associated with email are redundant, as you will see. Specifically, sales representatives are required to complete the same task multiple times per day. Welcome, demonstration, reminder, and thank-you emails are all frequently sent by sales representatives. They even have to follow up with emails to leads.It might take a long time.
Email templates can be used to better manage your time and repurpose them. What about automating the entire process? A tool for automation can be used to create email sequences and automated follow-ups.
Email personalization tools are essential for sales representatives. You can also track the number of people who open and click on emails. It helps you learn more about successful email marketing campaigns.
Opportunity & Lead Status
When you generate leads, which frequently mark the beginning of the sales process, there is typically a lot of volume. Some of them are just there to keep themselves occupied. So, how do you figure out who actually cares about your product or service?
Artificial intelligence-based lead scoring software is available for this purpose. To save salespeople time, the process of prioritizing leads can be automated. It is especially helpful for businesses that are having problems because their sales cycles are too long and their conversion rates are low.
Sales representatives spend too much time following leads who were never interested in the product or service in the first place, which results in low rates and lengthy cycles.
Lead Nurturing
Having additional information about leads can be quite helpful during the prospecting stage. Sales representatives will have a great way to connect with prospects if they know about the prospect's needs, timing, interests, and social media presence. In the end, this will help you make a good impression on potential customers and help you close more deals.
There are a number of lead enrichment tools available that accurately collect data from a variety of data sources. To put it succinctly, automated lead enrichment provides sales representatives with a comprehensive prospect profile so that they can develop a relationship with them and advance the conversation.
New Lead Response Time
It is more likely that the lead will answer your call if you call them as soon as they sign up. However, most of the time, that is not possible. You get leads from blogs, social media, and websites, among other places.
If they aren't assigned to sales reps right away, that causes a gap in time which dramatically reduces conversion rates and hurts the business. If you contact the lead too late, they might not be interested in your product or service anymore.
In fact, a study from Bright Local indicates that the optimal time to follow-up with a new lead is within the first five minutes. Anything after that and the chances of lead conversion drop by 80%!
By automating the distribution of leads, you can speed up deal closure and reduce response time. It's simple to assign leads to reps based on their location, status, opportunity value, and many other factors with the right software. Sales representatives can now contact prospects more quickly thanks to automation.
Online Booking
If a sales representative follows a lead and everything goes well, it is necessary to set up a meeting with the prospect. However, the frequent issue with time slots makes scheduling difficult.
Most of the time, either the prospect isn't available or the sales representative can't find a time when the prospect is. Additionally, it may appear to be impersonal. Therefore, it is necessary to automate the meeting scheduling procedure. Real Leads Finder Pro tools are used to assist sales representatives in doing exactly that. With Real Leads Finder Pro you can easily integrate your Google or Outlook calendar and generate a link to that can be sent to a prospect so they can choose a time that works best for them.
Generate Accurate Reports
Reports that are attached to emails require more than an hour of daily work from sales managers. Automations complete this time-consuming task to keep their team informed and motivated. It lets everyone know how the sales pipeline is progressing and how output can be measured.
The process of creating reports requires a lot of manual data entry and tabulation, which takes up a lot of time. There is likewise a chance of the event of a misstep in recording the information.
Selecting to automate the process of creating reports will make sales managers' lives much easier and ensure that the entire team will receive error-free reports.In addition, you can produce multiple reports in a short amount of time.
Set Yourself Up For Sales Automation
Automation is the process of automating repetitive and laborious sales tasks through the use of AI and software. This is advantageous because it helps salespeople save time and effort.Emailing, lead prioritization, lead distribution, and report generation are just a few of the sales process tasks that can be automated.
Even though automation of sales tasks is popular among most businesses today and has many advantages, you should not completely automate the sales process. Because there is no warmth in what you do without the human touch, reserve it for tasks that are time-consuming and tedious. Humans cannot be replaced, and automation is only meant to enhance our work.