Globally, the sales team is crucial in helping businesses succeed and it is often the duty of top-level executives to breathe life into sales teams. Sales teams are often pressurized to identify and gather leads, make contact, manage opportunities and leads, convert them to sales, and prepare sales reports. In between these dreary-sounding tasks, they also need to make calls, write emails, answer queries and engage in a lot of repetitive manual tasks.
In fact, across North America and Europe, manual and repetitive tasks take up sales teams’ time much more than actual core sales activities, which leads to reduced sales and conversion rates. Sales automation helps fix this problem and gives your sales team their mojo back. It helps them to get back on track and plan strategies and implement them, instead of writing repetitive reports.
In this article, let us take a look at what sales automation is, and how it accelerates your business growth.
What is the sales automation?
Sales automation is a software tool that helps your business to automate repetitive tasks such as documentation, sending emails, controlling inventory, pricing, and contract management. It often comes as a part of your CRM or can also be purchased separately, if you want a specialized tool. It helps to reduce the burden on your sales team by automating repetitive and manual tasks so that they can focus on core sales activities. In result, your sales team finds it easier to nurture leads, to interact with them, and to help convert them into customers. The reduced time and effort leads to increased productivity at work, and of course, sales automation has a number of other advantages too. Here are its basic features:
Close deals easily: Sales automation helps you to close more deals quickly. You can automate content management, collaboration, and use marketing tools that will help you to find leads as well. It is not a surprise that most businesses use sales automation to manage contacts and accounts and to manage sales opportunities.
Find more leads: Sales automation also helps you to find more leads. you can track how well your marketing campaigns are doing, and access sales data on demand. This helps you to send out reports to decision makers quickly so that territories can be planned and campaigns can be launched instantly.
Enhance productivity: Most sales automation tools are available on mobile devices, and you can perform sales activities while on the go. You can close deals while on the train or while waiting for your business lunch at a cafe. In other words, sales automation helps you to accelerate productivity. You can easily share files, sync data, and access visual workflows. All business processes can be automated using drag and drop features within a mobile app.
Make informed decisions: Most importantly, sales automation tools help you to make informed decisions at the right time. You gain access to reports and dashboards from wherever you are, and accessing sales forecasting gets just as easy as well. With real-time access to your team’s forecasts, mailing to and fro and intra-departmental squabbles are a thing of the past.
How sales automation accelerates growth
In this section of the article, let us take a look at how sales automation accelerates growth and quickly improves your teams’ productivity as well.
Sales departments spend a lot of time trying to identify who could be potential leads and customers. The more time they spend on identifying customers, the less time they can actually use to make contact with them. Sales automation helps identify customers and leads quickly using various metrics. This helps sales teams to quickly make contact and engage in actual sales activity to urge the customer to make a purchase. Businesses often waste considerable temporal and financial resources on customer identification and with a good CRM, that can simply be automated.
There is little wisdom in developing a sales strategy if we do not understand what the customers want. Knowing how the customers think, where they come from, and what their demographic tends to do are more important than blindly developing sales campaigns. Sales automation provides deep and rich insights about target audience so that intricate sales campaigns can be designed and developed. Targeted campaigns help drive up conversion rates and assist in company growth.
Writing reports and documenting sales activities are crucial duties a sales team does. However, these activities can take a lot of time, and result in unnecessary delays in performing other core activities. A good sales automation tool readily creates reports and helps you to focus on more important activities that cannot be automated. Why not generate reports and then make a presentation in person, which has a better impact than just mailing the marketing department cold reports? With sales automation, there will be more time for your sales team to engage in such activities that enhance inter-team communication and collaboration.
Whether it is writing emails or calling customers over the phone, if you do not do it at the right time, you will not be able to keep a lead warm. To make sure that customers are followed and tracked continuously, and to ensure that leads are kept warm, automate the process of follow-ups. Sales automation can automate communication and help you to remain in touch with them. However, do not automate all communication with your leads and customers as that can have unintended effects.
Call analysis provides valuable information about what customers want, and analyzing email texts can be equally important. CRM tools provide exquisite features that help you to track how email newsletters are read, by whom, and when. They also provide information related to how you can improve your email communication to enhances sales growth. Manual analysis is simply too tedious and sometimes not even accurate. Let us not forget about how important analyzing social media communication is for sales. A good CRM helps you to automate all this, generate reports and put it all in context.
Sales automation is uniquely useful because of the rich insights you can access. Insights can further be amplified with the help of artificial intelligence, big data, and integration with other tools you may use. For instance, a number of businesses tend to integrate their sales data with the data on their ERP. The result is, you can predict a lot of sales trends that you may otherwise not be able to. The predictive analysis adds more power to sales automation and helps sales teams to predict exactly what they need to do in order to enhance sales growth and overall business growth.
To achieve business growth, you should be able to optimize your sales department. After all, only if you sell more than your competitors will be able to gain a competitive edge. Automating sales activities will help your team to focus on core sales activities so that you gain a competitive edge. Insights can also tell you what your competitors are doing, what they may do next, and how you should change your strategy to do better than them. In other words, sales automation gives you a competitive edge which helps to accelerate business growth as well.
Sales teams spend a lot of time doing forecasting and engaging in report generation. Sales forecasting should be automated because it depends on a number of metrics, and what depends on metrics is always better when automated. Automated sales forecasts are accurate, quick, and almost instantaneous. They can also be shared across departments, and different data can be integrated for more accurate and better insights. A perfect example of this is a generation of sales forecasts based on marketing and sales data combined.
Sales automation helps you grow quickly
Automation brings a lot of benefits to companies when they use it correctly. It reduces manual entries, duplication of data, and frees up teams from repetitive tasks. It is important to use sales automation so that the sales team can use their extra time and resources on core sales activities. A good CRM usually has sales automation module, but you can also choose to purchase a sales automation tool separately. Regardless of what you do, it makes sense to integrate data from both sales and marketing teams for better forecasts and insights. As you might already know, all of this leads to organizational growth as well.
