Ultimate White Paper for Sales Automation

The path to new sales may involve endless meetings and numerous phone calls and emails. Before long, your sales team is overwhelmed by admin and spends less time bringing new business to the company.

These repetitive responsibilities are costly, and it's the main reason why more and more companies turn to sales automation to streamline the lead generation process. Automating sales helps your sales team to focus on what they do best, develop and build relationships, nurture leads and bring new customers into your business.

Every business is unique, with different needs, but the benefits of sales automation are universal in streamlining manual tasks and generating qualified leads.

Small companies may imagine automation is only for large corporations with a huge budget, but that's not the case. Automating sales is a cost-effective solution for increasing sales and is suitable for companies with a small team or a limited budget.

The Benefits of Sales Automation

1. Improves Sales Results

Remove the repetitive tasks from your sales team, and they can focus on selling. Automation can increase productivity and improve performance. Your sales team follows up on qualified leads, closing deals with prospects ready to buy.

2. It Speeds up the Sales Process

The automation process speeds up the client acquisition process with less risk of human error, bringing ideal customers into your business. The accuracy of the sales process also improves, which means more consistent business from newly acquired customers.

3. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

Sales automation decreases response times, which reduces customer dissatisfaction. It speeds up the sales process from the first call to the sale. Better response times means your prospects are more likely to convert.

And let's not forget existing customers. They need attention from your team too. When your sales team has more time, they can develop stronger relationships with existing clients.

4. Increased Data Consistency

Human error can create inaccurate data, which can cause costly mistakes. Automating the sales process leaves less room for human error resulting in more consistent and timely data.

5. It Saves Time

When your sales team works smarter instead of harder, sales results may improve significantly. Automating the sales process maximizes time efficiency, allowing your sales team to spend time on closing deals.

6. It Helps Identify Potential Customers

As a business, you understand the concept of targeted marketing. You know your business needs qualified prospects, those interested in your products or services.

When your sales team is cold calling, they must work through a lot of unqualified leads, which, again, is time-consuming. Qualified leads mean your sales team connects with prospects ready to buy.

7. It Helps Collect Customer Details

Automation tools collect customer statistics, a big help in understanding customer requirements. You can develop relevant and targeted strategies to help your sales team close more deals when you know your customers' needs.

A customer-centric approach is essential for success, no matter your business industry.

8. Maintain Better Relationships with your Customers

It's easy to become overwhelmed when interacting with clients. You may have several social media accounts and a subscriber list to maintain. Your team has follow-ups and reminders to keep on top of and suddenly discover they are behind with their tasks and customers aren't getting the service they need and expect.

Automation helps alleviate overwhelm and reduce the burden on your sales team.

9. It Simplifies the Reporting Process

Team reporting can be a challenging and time-consuming task. But with automation, your team can use CRMs to report to managers—no more drawn-out manual reports; instead, you have timely report submissions.

Automating the Sales Process

What aspects of the sales process can be automated?

We know that automation helps reduce the manual workload for your sales team, but what does that look like exactly?

How to use Online Sales Automation for Small and Medium Businesses

1. Emailing

Does your sales team spend a considerable chunk of time writing and sending emails?

If so, you've already identified an area where automation can help improve sales. By automating the email process, your sales team can contact prospects and build relationships with existing customers.

To assess your current needs for email automation, look at the everyday tasks involved -

• The day-to-day emails sent by your sales team
• How long does it take to write, edit, and send emails?
• How much personalization and customization are involved?

Add to this list the amount of time spent on email follow-ups, reminders, thank you emails etc., and you quickly realize it's a time-consuming process with unquantifiable ROI.

Automating the email process not only saves time but is also more sales effective.

Sales automation uses a targeted email list, personalized templates, and proven email sequences to create a successful email marketing campaign. Additionally, the bonus of email analytics helps to track what is or isn't working.

An automated sales process can also create A/B split testing.

Over a short period, your email marketing campaigns become highly efficient in attracting new customers.

2. Lead Generation

Targeted lead generation can be a challenge finding the right prospects potentially interested in your products or services. At this early stage, it can involve pursuing a high volume of leads, many of which may end up being tyre-kickers with no intention or interest in buying.

So, the priority for your company is to identify and locate your ideal customers, narrowing down the list to create a targeted email campaign. For this purpose, AI (artificial intelligence) lead scoring tools are excellent at prioritizing leads, significantly increasing the odds of finding prospects ready to buy, making it easy for your sales team to close the sales.

Automating the lead generation process is a huge time saver. If your company currently has long sales cycles and low conversion rates, your sales team may be wasting time chasing unqualified leads.

Automating the lead generation process can shorten the sales cycle and increase conversion rates.

3. Lead Enrichment

The more you know about your prospect and their company, the greater the chance of a conversion. Information about the buyer and their social media presence can help your sales team to connect on a one-to-one level.

For instance, if you know your prospect plays golf and has three children, this information gives your sales rep a start for a conversation opener. Researching potential customers is time-consuming, but automation cuts through this process and narrows down the prospect list to your ideal clients.

People love to feel important, no matter what level they are in a company. When your sales team shows they have done their research, it leaves a positive impression. Instead of the stereotypical sales pitch, using a personalized approach increases the chances of conversion.

Automated lead enrichment is a fabulous tool for building relationships with prospects.

4. Lead Distribution

Most automated sales companies send qualified leads directly to your chosen inbox. If you can contact the lead as soon as you receive the email, it increases the chances of talking to that prospect.

It's not always possible to respond as quickly as you'd like because leads may come from multiple channels, but it's a great yardstick to follow.

Never delay contacting a lead because more time equates to a potential loss of interest in what your company has to offer. Almost 45% of clients transfer their business to another company if response times are poor.

Sales automation tools can reduce response time by distributing leads to reps based on industry type, company size, location, and more. Your sales reps can make contact faster, massively increasing the chances of conversion.

5. Scheduling Meetings

Good timing is the essence of successful selling. A sales rep may contact a client and find difficulties in arranging a suitable time for a meeting, which can appear unprofessional.

Automated scheduling tools involve sending the prospect a link to choose a suitable time slot for a meeting.

These are a few examples of the automation process, and you don't have to select all of them for your business. Automated sales services can adapt to suit your needs and requirements.

Automating business sales tasks sounds excellent, but are there any downsides to automating the sales process?

The Downside of Sales Automation

It's tempting to automate every aspect of sales, but there are downsides to that.

As more companies expect personalization, they also anticipate a human touch as part of that expectation. Automating everything can come across as mechanical and leave prospects or customers feeling like they are just a number on your list.

For instance, your customer care department especially requires the human touch. Nobody wants to speak to a robot because it can lead to frustration when the caller cannot convey their needs effectively.

The human touch adds warmth to interactions and must still be an essential aspect of your client acquisition and customer care process.

Now, let's look at statistical results for automating sales.

Sales Automation Statistics

Statistically, automating parts of a business sales process can bring significant results for your company.

1. 61% of businesses using automation exceeded revenue targets in 2020. (HubSpot)
2. 44% of sales leaders who will exceed revenue in 2021 use competitive intelligence and market data. (HubSpot)
3. 34% of teams use a CRM for automating meeting follow-ups. (HubSpot)
4. 77% of B2B buyers say their last purchase was overly complex or difficult. (Gartner)
5. 42% of teams use a CRM for automating meeting scheduling. (HubSpot)
6. 29% of teams use a CRM for automating representative assignments. (HubSpot)
7. 40% of teams use a CRM to automate content generation. (HubSpot)
8. 36% of teams use a CRM to automate quote generation. (HubSpot)
9. 28% of teams use CRM for automating lead scoring. (HubSpot)
10. Between 2020 – 2023 the forecast for the adoption of AI is139% (Salesforce)
11. Predictive intelligence adoption in sales is forecast to grow 118% between 2020 and 2023. (Salesforce)
12. Lead-to-cash process automation in sales is forecast to grow 115% between 2020 and 2023. (Salesforce)
13. High-growth companies are around 31% more likely to incorporate business software automation than companies with no growth. (Hinge Research)
14. High-growth companies are 61% more likely to integrate automation into core business processes. (Hinge Research)
15. Companies using high-level automation as part of their sales process generate around 16% more leads than companies with low-level or no automation. (Hinge Research)
16. High-growth firms are more likely (26.2% vs 16.6%) to have sales automation in place than their counterparts. (Hinge Research)
17. Over 30% of sales-related activities can be automated. (McKinsey)
18. High-performing sales teams are 2.3 times more likely to use guided selling than teams underperforming. (Salesforce)
19. High-performing sales teams are 10.5 times more likely to positively impact forecast accuracy than underperforming teams when using intelligent capabilities. (Salesforce)
20. 44% of companies using Artificial intelligence software report reductions in business costs in the departments where AI is used (McKinsey).

Conclusion

Automating the tedious sales tasks is advantageous because it saves time and reduces effort, shortening the sales cycle, providing qualified leads, and generating more sales. It helps create a streamlined sales process that allows your company to appear more efficient and professional.

Leadpicker's global Sales Booster service takes care of the entire lead sourcing process by providing a highly-personalized service. Working with 500 teams in over 42 countries, Sales Booster have impressive results and glowing client testimonials.

To find out more, you can download the Ultimate Sales Automation Guide and see how automating sales with Sales Booster can help double your sales pipeline with a steady flow of qualified leads to your inbox.

If you want to grow your business with LinkedIn, a  LinkedIn prospecting service is also available.

Most sales tasks are suitable for automation, from emailing to generating reports and scheduling meetings. But it's essential to retain the human touch. Use sales automation to free up your sales team to develop relationships with prospects and customers, thereby maintaining human contact.