The Importance of Sales Automation For Your Business

“Sales automation” is more than just a vendor buzzword or something that applies to your Salesforce CRM. It’s an important practice that every sales team needs to take advantage of if they want to succeed. If you haven’t explored automated sales engagement and sales acceleration tools to boost productivity and improve revenue, take a moment to learn how sales automation can help you.

How Sales Automation Can Improve Your Business

These are some of the most important benefits that your business can enjoy when you employ sales automation:

Improve Your Reporting

To achieve peak productivity, sales and marketing should run like a well-oiled machine. For instance, could you improve your sales forecasts if you knew how many calls your top performers needed to close a sale? Would you have a better idea of how to address a prospect if you knew if he or she had opened your latest promotional email? Sales automation provides you with reports that will answer all of these questions and more.

Viewing in-depth historical records of calling and email activity, you will know how many calls it takes to meet sales goals. You’ll understand which of your email templates perform the best.

It’s imperative that you are able to measure sales engagement for a prospect, account, or for all of your prospects. Incorporate this data into your sales processes so you can prioritize the tasks most likely to result in a sale.

Go over this reporting often to understand how your prospects are responding to certain actions. Understanding the data allows you to adapt your sales strategy to fit your ideal customer.

Save Time and Improve Efficiency

It shouldn’t be surprising that in a study of sales teams, 88 percent of respondents said they could benefit from tools that helped them save time.

If your salespeople close deals on the phone, improve efficiency by relieving them of as many other tasks as possible. For instance, phone reps won’t have to spend time crafting emails if you can offer them tested templates to use for different steps in the sales process. Use sales automation to test different messages until you determine the best template for a specific touchpoint. Practice A/B testing, and test different subject lines and signatures to see what works best for your audience.

Automated phone sales software can dial phone numbers, drop prerecorded messages when appropriate, and track every detail of your company’s phone activity. Reducing manual dialing significantly increases reps’ productivity.

Educate Customers and Salespeople With Less Effort

You can use sales automation to automatically pair emails and other communication with specific call tasks. Nobody has to remember to send out these messages because they run automatically based on set triggers or on a specific schedule. But allow room for customization. Reps should have the ability to interrupt automatic email sends to edit the messaging so it’s more targeted toward a specific prospect.

Both salespeople and customers automatically get exposed to a better process with sales automation tools. You can eliminate wasted time spent on trial and error and make sure your customers see what they need to see when they need to see it. Even better, you can automate your communication if you plan to target your entire market. Make this complement your existing account based marketing strategy, with a paired email and calling strategy automated for each account or groups of accounts.

Automate Lead Scoring to Focus on High-Quality Leads

Your sales and marketing teams will thank you once you implement automated lead scoring. Nobody should have to manually sort through prospects to perform the error-prone and time-consuming task of trying to score each lead manually. And allowing reps to score leads as an ongoing process can become convoluted when different reps have different ideas around what makes a qualified lead.

With everybody in alignment about what a qualified lead looks like (think of factors like industry, number of website visits, if they’ve filled out a form, etc.), it will be easier to define disqualifications and make changes over time. Your scoring factors inevitably will change. That just means you need to set aside time for sales and marketing to meet again. Discuss which factors need to be updated to keep your qualified lead criteria up-to-date.

Automating this process ensures sales reps spend time on the right leads. You may also choose to send different messages to leads with different quality scores. Include this as part of your automated sales process.

Don’t look at automation as a way to replace your salespeople. Instead, consider these tools as a way to shorten the sales cycle, improve productivity, and of course, increase revenues.

This article was written by Senraj Soundar, founder and CEO of ConnectLeader. They are a company that provides sales acceleration software for B2B businesses. These services include dialers, internal sales performance gamification, data intelligence, and more. Senraj founded ConnectLeader when he realized there was a need to leverage CRM data so sales reps prioritize their best leads first. DemandZEN is proud to be a ConnectLeader partner.