Automation of sales operations can be a win for companies, marketers, and sales teams. It lends speed, accuracy, and efficiency to sales operations, adding to revenues and customer loyalty.
Sales automation platforms today are indispensable for companies that want to optimize revenue. It unlocks additional revenue-generation opportunities by automating outreach to customers.
Using sales automation can provide many new opportunities for companies. This article focuses on how to use it efficiently to drive business revenue.
What is Sales Automation?
HubSpot defines sales automation as,
“Sales automation helps all manual and time-consuming sales operations streamline in one platform and under one process using software and techs like AI & ML and other digital tools. Automation aims to manage and modernize the working mechanism of sales that goes daily, weekly, and monthly. It means marketers, sales representatives, and other teams can align sale tasks according to schedules set.”
Sales automation benefits business, sales team, and bottom line in the following ways:
- Increases performance of sales and productivity levels
- Accelerates sales process
- Ensures the sales leads are accurate
- Streamlines the process
- Improves the quality of sales
- Keeps sales data consistent throughout the process
- Efficiently uses resources that boost sales on the right path
How Automation Supports Sales?
According to McKinsey’s study in Sales Automation:
Automation platforms use technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), AI, and natural language processing/generation (NLG). These tools help them to reduce costs, improve customer services, and eliminate human errors.
Automated tools take care of lead nurturing email sequences. They enable the creation of new contacts. This helps to align campaign leads.
Sales automation tools connect the leads, prospects, and customers through social channels and CRM. This allows the teams to identify and store leads over the same platform.
HubSpot’s Key Sales Statistics report finds that
Sales automation, thus, allows the team to make the most out of the sales pipeline.
Using Sales Automation Tools to Drive Revenue
1. Data collection and Centralization
Marketers must collect and manage data for sales purposes. This could be a complex and time-consuming process if done manually—automation software for sales speeds up all types of data collection and management processes.
Then, it leads the data under a centralized system that sales teams and marketers use for various purposes.
The team will also need tools that integrate with customer service software, creating a unified database. This way, sales professionals can create a separate database to drive sales processes efficiently.
The automated integration enables sales teams to access updated market data in one place. These will be consistent records without any duplication.
2. Scoring of Leads
Only a small portion of leads turn into sales. Sales teams must focus on the leads most likely to convert. This will optimize the costs for lead acquisition and drive revenue.
Sales teams can use data insights from an automation platform to learn about the most valuable leads. They can then identify customers and understand their purchasing behaviors. Thus, sales automation can help with scoring and generating quality leads.
3. Distribution of Leads
Sales automation tools assign incoming leads to sales teams. The tools also assign the best-fit representative to take the lead and initiate tasks for conversions.
This makes the lead distribution process easy and ensures leads get the most accurate response to their queries.
4. Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is one of the key customer service metrics that’s helpful for automated sales processes.
The metric will help identify challenges in customer interactions and conversions. Removing those can help to drive revenue through quality conversions.
A well-suited sales automation tool will also automate CSAT surveys using chatbot and manual interactions. The results are added to CRM, providing context for future sales conversions.
5. Reporting
Sales professionals can automate the sales reporting process faster and accurately using automation tools.
Automated reporting includes graphic components like charts and graphs. This functionality makes it easier for the whole team to make reports that are easy to understand. Decisions based on clear insights are usually more effective.
In addition, the sales team can access regular insights on the sales performances. They won’t have to wait until the end of the sales period to understand the results and gain insights into performances.
The sales team can conduct reporting anytime to get live data performance insights. Even leaders can access team-level reporting to keep every sales aspect on track.
How a Sales Team Can Leverage Automation?
This section identifies critical steps for the development of a sales automation platform. It describes how sales professionals can achieve a successful sales automation journey.
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Examine the sales process to structure the platform:
Carefully examining the sales process will provide insights for adding useful functionalities and removing redundant ones. So, the platform can be optimal for use for a certain sales objective for the team.
By doing this, sales leaders can re-structure the automation process by integrating useful tools and techs. They can choose the functionalities they need in the platform to boost sales.
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Clearing out Sales Outcomes:
Some organizations plan to gain a small portion of sales output. Some others plan to process the entire sales and want overall results.
Organizations should have a clear vision for sales results and align automation opportunities. It is critical to prioritize using tools that will guide definite sales objectives.
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Responsive IT Support:
It plays a crucial role in supporting automation plans for sales and ensuring security measures. This way, sales leaders can create automation solutions to drive businesses.
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Emphasizing automation capabilities:
Sales automation offers consistent productivity improvements. However, they will offer no value if the functionalities do not match the business needs.
So, leaders should invest in customizing the abilities of sales automation platforms. This will help to build the right setup according to the needs of the sales process.
A proper skill development process is needed here to boost efficiencies across the team for an automation platform.
Also Read: Three Ways Marketing Automation Can Bridge the Gap in Marketing-Sales Alignment
Conclusion
With automation, companies will benefit from higher productivity in sales numbers. Most importantly, each sales automation journey requires unique planning and optimization.
Sales teams should use the techniques and principles as a guide to explore more opportunities to boost the figures and gain maximum customers (conversions)
Similarly, they should also carefully adapt and modify tools as needed. So, employing sales automation within the business should benefit from the beginning to the end of the sales process.
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