We are in 2022, with a lot of technology around, everything has been automated and sales is not an exception. Organizations irrespective of their size are trying their best to streamline the sales process and make it as effective as possible. While it has become the need of the hour to have a properly streamlined process, the sales reps are spending more than 50% of their time on tasks that can be automated using a tool easily. This is where sales automation has stepped in.
Sales automation is going to play quite an important role in the sales process as it is going to streamline various processes with ease at once. Now the reps can close the deals without putting in a lot of effort into the regular monotonous tasks. They can just focus on the most important thing- dealing with the customer whilst the remaining tasks can be handled by the automation tool.
I have been talking about sales automation a lot, why don’t we have a look at what it is and various other aspects around it?
What is Sales Automation?
So, before we dig deeper into the topic, it is important to know what sales automation is.
Sales automation software is a tool that is designed specifically to streamline the sales process in an organization. It automates the workflows and sales tasks. The sales automation can accommodate sales teams, customers, partners, and distribution channels as well.
This will help the salespeople in closing deals that have high-value prospects whilst maintaining relationships with the existing customers. With the right sales automation software, the reps can save their time whilst the tool will take care of updating contact information, managing the calendars, and processing different opportunities without having to update them manually.
On the other hand, the sales manager can take care of managing the entire reps in real-time, follow up with the leads proactively, record all the touch points with customers, and close sales quicker. With the sales automation software, it becomes quite easy to map out the sales funnel that tracks your prospects’ journey effectively.
This sales funnel has different activities like identifying the prospects, finding the relevant information related to these prospects, following up with the leads from time to time, moving the qualified leads down the sales funnel, nurturing, converting the leads into opportunities, and making the sale.
Working of Sales Automation
Now, that you have a fair idea of what is sales automation and how it can help organizations to make a sale, it is time to understand the working of sales automation.
Automated Guidance
How can guidance be automated? The sales automation software will keep sending notes and reminders related to the sales process that is happening to the reps. This way reps will always be on the track with things that are happening and what they can do about them.
Automate Lead Management
Sales reps can make use of filters, and rules to create curated lead lists. Depending upon the lead activities, these lists are curated. These activities include email open rates, social media searches, clickthrough rates, etc. The software will give a score for each of the leads according to their performance.
Depending upon these lead scores, each of your leads is divided into respective lists or buckets.
Automate Communication
Communication plays quite an important role when it comes to business. Right from the first time you contact your customer to closing the deal, communication is involved everywhere. The right sales automation tool will help in automating these calls too. Here are some of the things that you can be automated-
- Leaving a voicemail on the customer’s phone when they do not answer your call.
- Schedule the meetings on the call itself with the help of the IVR self-help menu. This happens when you integrate your sales automation software with a CRM.
- You can draft email sequences that can be personalized as per customers’ requirements. As in, if the customer has just completed a purchase, you can drop them an email thanking them for it, etc.
- You can also give your email subscribers an option to unsubscribe, remove the email ids that are not active, etc.
Data Entry
No sales rep would go by a day without entering the data. When it comes to sales, everything is about data. It is time-consuming and a small mistake can lead to a big hassle too. However, it is unavoidable.
Once you feed the system with all product, pricing details, leads, and customers’ contact details, the software will take care of the remaining things. It streamlines the entire contact management which will save up a lot of hours for your sales reps daily.
Logging Activity in Real Time
Now, this is an important feature for both sales reps and managers. All the activities that your sales rep does on the sales automation software are tracked and displayed on a real-time screen for the manager. A manager can log in at any point of time during the day and check these activities.
Right from prospect calls you made to the deals that you have closed, everything is documented right to the point automatically. This takes off a lot of hassle from the rep’s plate.
Automated Profiling
The sales automation tool will create a profile for every contact that is a prospect or a customer. Sales reps just have to scan the visiting card of a profile and all of their details are stored automatically by the tool. This is a feature that comes in handy for all the field sales reps precisely.
Key Elements of Sales Process that can be Automated
There are so many modules that are present in the sales automation system that can be automated with ease. Let us know about all of these processes.
Emailing
Although the salespeople do not use this feature as frequently as marketing people do, salespeople do send emails at regular intervals. Most of the formal communication is done via emails only and this is where the sales automation will help.
The sales team can set an automated email sequence and send it to their contacts as and when required. The best thing about a sales automation tool is that these automated emails are personalized as per the end user.
Emailing is a redundant task and the sales reps keep doing it on an everyday basis. While it is important to send emails, the task isn’t worth the sales reps’ valuable time. So, it is important to understand when to strike the right balance of staying in touch with your customers at the same time.
Lead Prioritization
Generating leads is the first step of any sales process. When you are starting with lead generation, it is imperative to have more number of leads coming in. There is no guarantee that all of these leads are going to be closed. Most of them are nothing but a waste of time for your sales reps.
Filtering them out properly and finding the actual leads who have an interest in your product or service is quite important. To get this done, there are various lead scrolling tools that can be used. These tools work with the help of artificial intelligence. This way, the sales reps don’t have to waste their time on other work. They will be directed in the right way and would be able to get more work done.
When you have the right sales automation tool at your perusal, you just have to create the persona of your ideal customer and give it a score to analyze them.
With these sales, people will be able to have more time on their hands. This is quite helpful for companies that are struggling with low conversion rates. There are organizations that have longer sales cycles. These longer sales cycles are not a good sign for any organization as they are forced to spend a lot of time and resources in closing just one deal.
The sales reps will be able to close the deals and lower the cycle length by just focusing on the leads who have more possibility to turn into deals.
Nurturing the Leads
Once a lead is qualified for sales reps, then it is important to nurture those leads as much as possible. For this, they need additional information. This information can either be the prospect company name and what they are offering, the vendor details, their social media presence, and many other details.
Being aware of these things will surely make a lot of difference. The sales reps would be able to cater to clients in a better way. They can break the ice, and discuss the client’s company and various other details in a better way.
You can use tools like Office4by7 to gather the information related to these leads and nurture them. On our platform, we have different cards for different customers and all the information is present on that card. Reps just have to open it to know about the client and if they want to add anything to the information, they can edit the card easily.
Automatic Lead Distribution
When a prospect got interested in your product or service and provided their information to you, it is important to act on that particular lead as soon as possible. This way you will be able to spark interest and convert them into deals quickly.
However, this is not an easy task. When we talk about lead sources, there are many. Organizations usually have different lead generation possibilities starting from website visitors to paid campaigns and social media, there are various options. Segregating these leads as per their sources and assigning them to sales reps is a time taking process.
This will delay the contact process for agents which may drive the client to competitors. Time is of the essence here. This is why you can cut down the entire response time by automatic lead distribution. As soon as the leads are captured by Office24by7, they are distributed among the reps as per the preset rules.
This will prompt reps to contact the prospects immediately. This lead distribution process is quite easy, you can create the rules for distribution and the software will share them among the reps accordingly.
Schedule Meetings
Meetings with clients are quite important in any organization. When a sales rep follows through with a particular lead and if things go well, there will be a need to schedule a meeting with that prospect. While it is important, it is not that easy.
To conduct these meetings and give them demos, there is a need for a product specialist. It is important to know that the product specialist, prospect lead, and sales rep are on the same page when it comes to timing. This is where the automation process comes in.
The sales rep should just have to send the time slot link to the prospect after confirming it with the product specialist and now the client just has to book the slot where he is free. This way, the work will become easy and professional for all the parties that are involved.
There are different tools to do this but having it right in your sales automation software has its benefits. You will have all the meeting information and various other details in one place easing out your process.
Reporting
A sales team will have multiple members and the manager has to track all of them to ensure that they are closing the leads properly. They have to send emails with these reports to ensure that the entire team is on the same page when it comes to reporting and that everyone knows how many deals are present in the pipeline.
This task is tiresome as curating the reports and analytics can be time taking process. Apart from being time-consuming, some human errors might occur too. All of these make the entire reporting task tough.
But there is no need for the managers to fret about it as there is automatic report generation available. Sales automation tools will make it easy to curate these reports. These reports are created in real-time and the entire team will have access to them. The best part about this is that you can create multiple reports in a very short time.
Implement Sales Automation with Ease
There is no doubt in saying that automating the sales process will be beneficial for your organization. However, it is important to follow a particular procedure to ease things out the things.
Understand the Sales Process
Automation will surely make difference but before you proceed with it, you have to access the approach that you are using at present. You need to run the process manually and see how long every activity is taking. This way you will know which of these processes you need to automate and what you don’t have to.
What do you want?
You are opting for automation for a reason. There are shortcomings in your existing process that you want to change. So, before you automate things, set the goals that you want to achieve with this process. You need to clearly have an idea of what to automate and what not to. This will give you a proper perspective on how you are going to work.
Know Your Options
Now that you clearly have a preset plan on how to proceed with your process, it is time to focus on the sales automation tool. It is given that the market has been flooded with this automation tool and finding the right one would take some time.
So, be careful while choosing the right sales automation software provider. You can always rely on software like Office24by7 which will help you right from lead tracking to closing the deal and understanding the ROI.
Train the Team
Do not just bring in the sales automation tool and make your employees work on it. First, pick a group of people preferably managers and senior reps. Make them implement the process and see whether things will go smoothly or not. They have to closely observe each and every step of the implementation process.
This will give a clear idea of what is working and what is not for your team. You can tweak the project and make changes as and when required.
Set it Up
Once you are done with the trial and error processes and understood what works and what does not for your organization, it is time to train the entire team about the procedure. They will be needing some practical experience which will make their work even simple and more efficient.
Automate Your Sales with Office24by7
Now that you know how sales automation can benefit your organization, it is time to understand how Office24by7 can be your partner in this process. Let us have a look at it.
Office24by7 is a complete CRM suite offering a sales automation process. You can use our product to automate your marketing, capturing prospective leads and then closing them. We know how daunting closing a deal can be and how tough it would be to track the touch points, but don’t worry. Office24by7 can help you in the entire process.
Prospecting
Prospecting is the first and most important step of any business. Sales reps would be needing all the possible information that they can gather on the customers before contacting them.
Office24by7 will provide you with all of this information. Right from when the lead has been generated to the touch points if any, every little bit of information is present in the lead card. This will give the required customer history.
Outreach
As said earlier, Office24by7 is not just a tool that will help you in sales automation, we have a marketing automation tool too. You can use it to launch different campaigns and make your work easier. You will be able to create different types of email campaigns, we have templates that you can use for this purpose.
Increase the open rates of your emails with a touch of personalization, and contact your prospects through WhatsApp and on various other channels. Reaching out to the customers in the right way can turn your tables and make work easier.
You can track all the outreach work that you have done and see what you can do better. Know the open rate, bounce rate, and various other details which will help you in designing your next campaigns even more effectively.
Wrapping it Up
Closing the deal is eventually the most important part. You can create your own sales pipeline as per your requirements. Once you do this, you will be able to track the performance of your team efficiently. You will have a chance to take a glance at the prospects and at which stage of the pipeline they are present right now.
Another best thing about Office24by7 is that you can use our sales automation software to predict the revenue as well. Our tool is going to calculate the amount, of resources that are spent in closing a deal and compare it with the revenue that you got because of that deal. This will help in understanding the ROI.
All of these are just the tip of our iceberg. If you want to know how Office24by7 can become your reliable partner in closing the deals, give us a call on +91 7097171717 or drop us an email at sales@office24by7.com. So, who is ready to skyrocket their sales and close more deals every month now?
