If you want to increase leads and close more deals, sales automation is the right choice. Sales automation leverages apps to remove manual and repetitive tasks. It provides your sales team the chance to focus their energies on content creation and closing deals. Some key benefits of automation include enhanced reliability, accuracy, and productivity. According to Finance Online, automation increases sales by 14.2%. Already, 72% of companies use sales automation. The first step to take is to decide what processes need automation. Next, choose the right tools and train your team. Create a strategy for analysis and report generation to view performance.
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What is Sales Automation?
Sales automation is a strategy where companies use software to automate processes. The strategy uses artificial intelligence and a variety of digital tools. It eliminates tedious manual processes that sales teams do daily and manages their daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. Automation benefits both your sales reps and the company in a variety of ways.
- Enhanced productivity
- Enhanced lead generation and nurturing
- Increased efficiency
- Increased accuracy and data analysis
- Accelerated sales processes
- Effective sales funnel management
- Streamlined workflows
- Quick response time
- Data consistency across multiple channels
- Saves time and revenue
- Increase in customer satisfaction
How to build a sales automation strategy
As your business achieves growth, you need a dynamic system that can send the pertinent information to your online audiences on time with little effort from your team. Sales automation lets companies segment their audiences and customize their sales campaigns at scale. To benefit from automation and maximize ROI from your sales campaigns, you need to build a sales automation strategy. The type of strategy you choose depends on your business needs and your sales campaign goals.
Define your goals
When implementing sales automation, you should consider the type of device you choose for work. In modern times, almost every enterprise chooses a MacBook for work processes. due to their growing popularity. They have a sleek design and an intuitive user interface. The first step when starting your sales automation is to define achievable goals.
Create goals that can be measured, and ensure they are relevant and specific. The customer should be your main focus in automation. You should focus on reaching out to them with customized quality content. This way, you can turn them into leads and convert them into customers. Your automation goals must align with your marketing goals. You need to have a clear marketing process and a way to measure success or failure.
Define your buyer persona
Buyer persona defines who your ideal customer is. It defines customer characteristics and behavior. First, you need to create this customer in your mind before reaching out to him. Gather all relevant primary information that describes that customer. You define him in terms of:
- What demographics define your customer?
- Where is the customer located?
- What challenges or pains do they face?
- What is their buying behavior?
- What jobs do they do and what living class are they in?
Map an engaging automated user journey
The purpose of automation is to eliminate manual processes and to increase efficiency. For the best outcomes, you must create an engaged automated journey. Your ideal customer interacts with your brand through many channels. Mapping out helps you understand the various stages at which your ideal customer gets in touch with your brand. It helps you understand the entire customer lifecycle journey and how to keep them engaged at every phase. Engagement starts at the point where a customer gets interested in your brand.
Take advantage of multichannel automation
In a multichannel environment, you allow your customers to decide the most preferred channel for connecting with your brand. You achieve this by automating sales processes across different channels. It allows your brand to reach the customer on time on the relevant platform. Multichannel automation will give your business different benefits.
- Increase your customer base
- Increase brand presence
- Improve engagement
- Minimize risks and increase income
- Maximize the brand’s supply chain
Score your leads
Lead scoring ranks your leads in terms of sales readiness through predefined methods. Your brand should first decide the criteria to use or which data points show lead qualification. You should then assign criteria-based point values and get final scores for each lead. To achieve a successful lead generation campaign, rank each lead score against another to see which one is likely to convert. Lead scoring provides your brand with a variety of benefits.
- A boost in conversion rates
- Enhanced efficiency in sales
- Greater productivity in sales campaigns
- An aligned sales and marketing process
- Lead generation efforts that are measurable
Filter your contacts
Through automation, your brand builds a contact list from social media, subscriptions, offers, signups, and more. It is necessary to filter the contacts to help your brand understand their potential, value, and where to find them. It helps you to know the type of customized content to use to lead them in the funnel. Filtering leads segments based on certain characteristics and behavior. You get to know leads that you have contacted, those you haven’t, the ones who need follow-up, made an inquiry, purchases, and so on.
Focus on building a quality relationship
Building quality relationships with leads and converts helps build long-term business success. Quality interactions increase trust and the pace of communication from customers to the brand. It is the strategy that helps sustain leads in the sales funnel until they become converts. After converting, quality relationships are what sustains them to increase retention rate and attract repeat customers. To build quality interactions, show that you care. Move with the customer’s pace and model a behavior adoptable by the customer.
Analyze and repeat
Analysis and repeat using tools to determine the buying characteristics of customers per product. Analysis shows which customers have made purchases more than once in a certain period. You need to use data and generate a report on the total customers willing to order products again from your brand. Have a view on the rate at which they are willing to buy and the value of purchase they are willing to spend.
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Best sales automation strategies to increase leads
Brands need to appropriately assign leads to avoid confusing sales teams in the automation process. It drives sales teams towards achieving lead conversion goals on time. Automation helps to nurture and manage leads to boost efficiency and close more leads. To achieve success in automated lead generation, your brand must adopt achievable strategies.
Get started with email automation
Brands are adopting email marketing mainly due to the high ROI the strategy offers. Email automation tools allow brands to send the right emails to customers in real time. The system sends action-triggered emails to leads after signups, subscriptions, and clicks. If you have issues with your mail app, there are many possible solutions to fix them. In email marketing, sales copywriting plays an important role. Research shows email marketing success is up to 40 times compared to other methods. Automation helps save time for sales teams, increase leads, conversions, and repeat customers. Your brand benefits from personalized customer experiences and a scalable sales strategy.
Set up automatic follow-ups
Follow-ups in marketing create an impression in customers that you care about their needs and you are available to offer help. It is a strategy that helps customers to stick with your brand and make more purchases. Follow-up automating tools allows brands to create automated follow-ups in sales campaigns. It ensures leads and customers get an additional message once they get in touch with your brand regardless of the channel they use. It can be a new touch or a follow-up to a previous touch. Automatic follow-ups should be based on your automation roadmap.
Implement a CRM system to automate your sales process
A CRM is one of the best tools to use for workflow automation in your sales plan. Its purpose is to boost customer service, sales, and marketing processes in business. It organizes records and allows tracking, and advancing customers in the purchase journey.
Automating the tool helps integrate all your sales data including customer data integration, customer segmentation, and marketing content integration. The CRM provides your salespeople with a full view of the sales funnel and a quick response to lead guidance. It makes it easier to merge customer data, qualify leads, and send personalized marketing messages.
Automate billing and invoice processing
Revenue leakage mainly happens due to erroneous billing, delayed invoicing, data processing errors, and failure to track profitability. Billing and invoicing challenges cause the greatest loss of revenue in companies. Delays happen due to an increase in the volume of bills that need to be processed. Automation helps reduce errors and eliminate manual processes.
It enhances the approval processes and saves on costs. Invoicing and billing automation eliminates delays in claims, and penalties, and maximizes visibility. Your brand builds stronger customer relationships and improves on monitoring and reporting. Its greatest benefit is sealing off revenue leakage to boost profitability and growth.
Top 5 Sales Automation Tools
The process of sales automation needs time, technology, and a budget. Sales automation tools help make the process complete and measurable. They contain features for automating repetitive tasks to build simplified and profitable sales journeys. Most sales automation tools are integrated with CRM, lead generation, and email marketing software. The choice of tools to use depends on business goals and customer needs.
HubSpot Sales
HubSpot Sales is a tool integrated with CRM to simplify the management of daily sales reps’ tasks. It allows the team to manage emails, prospects, telephone calls, and schedule meetings. The tool can also be used to monitor the sales funnel and data including updated content details. Sales reps can send emails directly to customers from the tool and set automated reminders to increase retention. It makes it easier to start conversations and sell faster, and better.
GetResponse
GetResponse is an automation tool with multiple uses. It can be used to build websites, do email marketing, and lead generation. It is a cloud-based tool built for use in e-commerce to boost sales in e-stores.
Its main personalized features include the entrepreneur tool, online marketer tool, and marketing management tool. It also features a tool for use by large companies to increase their ROI and scale business. Brands handle a variety of sales strategies and engage in different contracts with customers and suppliers. A contract management tool can help retain contracts and take the right actions in real time.
Salesmate
Salesmate is the right tool to choose if you want to close more deals and build a long list of happy customers. It offers a powerful built-in calling tool that can connect calls to more than 90 countries. The tool consists of features for recording calls, masking, automatic dialing, automated call transfers, and voicemail dropping. It is useful for email campaigns and funnel management.
Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is used for identifying and tracking leads. Sometimes leads need to leave their contacts which makes it harder to do follow-ups. This tool identifies them even when they fail to give their contacts. The data helps brands to understand leads better and create personalized strategies for reaching out to them. It filters quality leads, removes unwanted contacts, and generates a quality list.
In addition, Leadfeeder provides localization features, allowing brands to track leads not only by their contact information but also by their geographic location. This helps businesses target specific regions or countries with tailored sales campaigns and content.
Conclusion
Sales automation uses software to automatically run processes. Brands use different AI-powered digital tools to eliminate repetitive and tedious manual processes. Automation leads to an increase in closed deals, enhanced reliability, and productivity. Brands need to adopt sales strategies that can be measured, achieved, and replicated. Sales automation tools enable brands to automate different processes in the sales funnel. They include email automation tools, lead generation, and CRM tools.
