Automation has been revolutionary in transforming the world that we are experiencing today. Automation has been applied to many fields and the results are out for the world to see. And, sales is one of the best areas that can be automated.
Sales automation can vastly improve the sales and revenue of any business. It can also help to reduce overheads, increase productivity, and scale your business to new heights.
The sales process has a direct impact on any business’s revenue and profits. Hence, using sales automation can have a direct, significant impact on your ROI. In fact, studies show that sales force automation can lead to a 30% increase in deal closures!
If you are keen to learn more about sales automation and how it can improve your sales, then read on. Through this article, you’ll learn tips and tricks that can help you to adopt and use sales automation to attain the best results for your business.
What is Sales Automation?
Sales automation is the process of standardizing and automating your sales process by putting parts of the process into autopilot mode. This can save you a lot of time because your sales team does not have to work on repetitive, time-consuming sales processes. Instead, your sales team can focus on more important business tasks.
Using sales automation, you can streamline tedious and time-consuming tasks, and increase your productivity.
How can Automation Boost your Sales and Revenue?
Let’s look at some of the top ways in which automation can boost your sales and revenue.
1. Save the Time of your Sales Team
Sales automation tools can put many parts or the entire process of sales in autopilot mode.
For instance, sales automation can help to automatically route incoming leads to the right sales team members, provide lead intelligence, update contact records, etc. These data entry tasks would otherwise take weeks or months for your sales team members to complete.
Without sales automation, your resources are getting wasted. And one of the most important resources is time. The amount of time you save through automation software can be much more valuable than the money you invest in a sales automation tool.
The days and weeks spent on data entry tasks can be directed towards more humanized parts of your sales process such as interacting and negotiating with the prospects.
2. Better Lead Intelligence
Better lead intelligence can be extremely beneficial in improving the ROI of your campaigns. Insights such as the pain points of your leads, their goals, etc can be useful to close more deals.
Sales automation can analyze your lead data and come up with super-helpful lead intelligence data based on that.
A sales automation tool can eliminate the guesswork that a salesperson would have to do while interacting with the lead. It can provide insights about what points to address for your leads, based on analytics and data. This way, your conversion rates will be much higher.
For example, through sales automation tools, salespeople can get to know about the best timings and mediums to reach out to a lead. These insights can help you convert more and more leads to customers.
3. Optimize Lead Distribution and Prioritization
If you operate internationally, then distributing leads based on geographical locations might be a painstaking task for you. Your sales team members are probably manually routing leads to salespeople based on their locations.
Sales automation can be used to completely automate your lead distribution process. With a little initial setup, all the leads that you receive from different channels and mediums will be automatically distributed to the right salespeople based on their geographical locations.
Lead prioritization is another important aspect of your sales process. Not all your leads are going to be the same. Some are more likely to convert than the other leads. Directing your resources on all leads equally is not the best way to go about it. And doing it manually can be very challenging.
Sales automation tools can also automate your lead prioritization. Using the data from these tools, salespeople can focus more on the high-priority leads. This will help you gain more conversions and increased ROI.
4. Improve your Sales Process Through Automated Reporting
Analytics and reporting are super important tools to help you get better in your sales process. With sales automation, you can get automated, comprehensive, and real-time reports on your sales processes.
These reports can be transformational for the betterment of your entire sales process. You’ll be able to gain eye-opening insights about what is going well and what is not going well with your sales process.
Moreover, real-time insights can help you get the right things done at the right time. This can, again, help improve parts of your sales process, encouraging your sales team to be more efficient, ultimately leading to increased sales.
5. Direct your Sales Team’s Resources Towards Productive Tasks
Today, personalization and more humanized interaction are valued more than anything. We, as consumers, want to feel more valued. We are bombarded with sales pitches everywhere. So, we naturally are inclined towards those businesses that make us feel special and have more personal interactions with us.
As discussed before, sales automation can entirely eliminate the menial, wasteful data entry tasks that sales teams used to do the most a few years ago. Instead, your sales team can focus more on tasks that cannot be done by machines.
Sales teams can build strong relationships with your prospects and customers by having personal interactions with them and working on strategies that will lead both you and your leads towards success. Thus, sales automation encourages the best and most profitable use of your sales team members.
6. Better Management of Customer Data
One of the main challenges faced by marketing and sales teams in the management of prospect and customer data. Especially today, when omnichannel marketing is prevalent, businesses tend to get leads from lots of different channels such as emails and social media messages.
Because of this, managing and maintaining user data can be very time consuming and difficult. Manual errors tend to crop up due to which you may even lose track of some leads.
Sales automation tools can help you overcome this by maintaining and managing your lead and customer data. With just a click of a button, salespeople can pull up all the lead information, helping them to be more efficient at their jobs.
7. Increase your Sales Velocity
Sales velocity is a measurement of how fast you can close deals and generate revenue. Sales automation, as you guessed, can also help to improve your sales velocity.
Sales automation tools improve the productivity of your sales teams and automate a lot of manual and time-consuming sales processes. This gives time for your sales team to communicate and build better relationships with prospects.
Moreover, sales automation also helps with lead intelligence and prioritization. All these factors help to accelerate your sales process. Your sales teams will be able to close more deals in the same time, thus increasing your overall sales velocity and revenue.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, we can say that sales automation can help accelerate your sales and growth in many different ways. Apart from making your sales team more productive and efficient, it can also help with other useful parts of the sales process like gathering lead intelligence, prioritizing leads, and providing comprehensive reports.
If you haven’t invested in sales automation for your business, then this is the right time to do so. This is the wisest business decision that you can take today, that will lead to multiple wins for your business in the near future.