Sales has been one of the most traditionally challenging responsibilities in business. You will always find salespeople hustling round the clock, often sacrificing their personal times to meet numbers. If you are in sales, you have probably wished that the typical day would be 28 or 30 hours, if not more. Well, one cannot create more hours in a day. But, your sales workload can definitely be reduced with the help of sales automation. In fact, sales professionals estimate they save up to 3 hours daily using automation tools.

What is Sales Automation

Running a successful sales process can involve a lot of tasks. Sales automation is the process of automating certain processes or parts of processes within your sales workflow. A variety of softwares can be used to achieve automation at different steps of the sales process.

In today’s globalized remote work model, coordinating and communicating with distributed teams adds another layer of responsibility. Automating sales reduces the manual efforts required to run a global business team, and keeps everyone on the same page. It also leads to boosts in individual as well as team productivity.

While sales automation cannot do sales on your behalf it can free you up of cumbersome tasks like data entry or activity logging. To understand how and where to deploy sales automation, let’s quickly look at a typical sales process.

What does a typical sales process look like

Imagine a mid-market software business, here’s how their typical sales process might look like:

Prospecting

This is the outbound process in pursuit of new business, where your Sales Development or Business Development teams search for potential buyers, clients or customers to reach out to. 

Qualification

Once the process of prospecting is underway, salespeople are reaching out to leads and trying to set up a conversation. 

While doing this, SDRs usually undertake a discovery process with the goal of qualifying the prospect as a potential customer. Certain lead qualification frameworks like BANT, MEDDIC or ANUM are usually followed in this step. 

In some cases, qualification is also done via inbound marketing. Here, prospects reach out to a business via ads or form submissions on the website. And an SDR will try to have a conversation to understand the fit and qualify.

Demonstration

Once a lead is qualified, the next step is to present a demonstration of your offerings, catering to your prospect’s needs. A senior sales executive or account manager might step in here — sales folks with industry knowledge who can effectively consult the ideal solution for the prospect based on their unique needs or challenges. 

Proposal/Quote

This is the stage where your sales team sends out a proposal based on the discussions. A commercial proposal shared with the prospect mentions what is on offer, the charges involved, terms of execution and implementation. 

Objection Handling

Once a proposal is sent, there might be further conversations specific to points  stated in the proposal/quote. Usually, this stage is just a commercial negotiation.

Close

This is the outcome of the sales process. You get to know whether you have landed the prospect’s business or not. In the first case, the deal is considered Closed Won. 

If the discussions go sideways, objections become insurmountable or the customer chooses to go ahead with a competitor, the deal can be considered Closed Lost.

Parts of the Sales Process you can Automate

Off the top of our heads, we can make a list of 5 or 10 sales processes that can be automated. However, there is more depth to sales automation than meets the eye. There are multiple pieces and moving parts within the actual implementation of the process that must be considered. 

Broadly categorizing, here are the parts of the sales process that most commonly benefit from automation:

1. Assistance - Automation tools can set reminders for tasks like setting up a call or sending a follow-up email. This ensures things move ahead at the right time and right pace. You can simultaneously continue your pursuit of leads without missing out on anyone. Automating the assistance bit can aid in multiple steps of the sales process, from prospecting, lead qualification, discovery or even closing. In a nutshell, it is akin to setting up an automated task management process for yourself. 

   
   

2. Lead Management - In lead management, sales automation can help you analyze lead behavior, assign scores and help prioritize leads that are ready for a conversation. 
   
   Traditionally, sales managers / team leads have had to manually analyze every lead’s behavior, before sorting, scoring and assigning them accordingly. Software programs can complete the entire task of lead management in minutes, and deliver a curated list of leads salespeople can pursue confidently! One good example is the HubSpot lead scoring tool or ‘HubSpot Score’.
   
   As far as lead qualification is concerned, companies using automation noticed a 451% increase in the number of qualified leads, as per a study by Invesp.

   
   

3. Communication - We’re still some time away from Artificial Intelligence replacing human conversations. But, sales automation programs like chatbots can be quite crafty in building context quickly, so that the right message goes to the right person. 
   A study by Drift reveals that around 82% of consumers today expect a response within 10 minutes. It is near impossible for sales reps, especially at smaller organizations, to respond to every lead within such a short time. That’s why almost every business is setting up chatbots or similar communication tools to initiate conversations with raw leads. 
   Additionally, sales automation can also be adopted for introduction emails, reminders, or follow-up emails via drip campaigns. Sales email automation has statistically proven to be highly beneficial for businesses. 

   
   

4. Research - Imagine your marketing team just handed over a bunch of fresh leads. But as you go through them one by one, you find new leads with missing data. Or leads with data with not enough context to know if they are a right fit. Now how do you fill in the gaps? 
   Automation, using lead database sources, can help bring you the research you need, exactly when you need it. These automation tools will scan the vast and continually updated sea of information on the internet for you. They will find and deliver all the missing data points against a particular lead, making your job hassle-free. 

   
   

5. Data Entry - According to a HubSpot study, over 71% of salespeople feel that they waste too much time on data entry. So they now ask automation tools to do the tedious task for them. 

   Data entry softwares can be handy in updating the record properties in your CRM database to reflect the exact stage or sales process for leads you’re working on. Getting the never ending task of CRM data entry automated is probably the biggest win in our books.
   
   

6. Activity Logging - What can’t sales automation do! There are now tools that will even log all your sales activities into your CRM so that there is a central record maintained. They track your sales emails, meetings, conversations, phone calls and other details of interaction with a particular lead. At any time, a sales manager can stay on top of the progress made with each lead. 

Why You Should Consider Sales Automation

If you prefer to do sales the old school way, sans all these hoopla around “sales automation”, here are some stats for you:

72% of the most successful global businesses have adopted marketing and sales automation, according to a HubSpot study. Among them, 45% of the companies admit the biggest boost in efficiency and ROI after sales automation. Additionally, 49% of the companies acknowledge that these automation programs helped them save large amounts of time. 

There are several other well-documented upsides of sales automation. 

Boost in productivity happens to be one of the most proven benefits of automation in sales. With the best sales automation softwares taking care of the “boring” and time-consuming tasks, salespeople have more time and energy to focus on lead conversion. 

Sales processes also become tighter and foolproof with automation, as there is zero room for “manual errors”. 

Accuracy of data is another benefit that a sales automation software can ensure. If you delegate a task like data entry or activity logging to an already overworked sales employee, chances of errors are quite high. Meanwhile, a software program will ensure the data is correct, up-to-date and readily available at your fingertips. 

Reliability and scalability of the sales process often prompts fast-growing businesses to sign up with sales automation platforms.

Getting Started with Sales Automation

If you’ve read up to here, you’re most likely preparing to kick off your sales automation journey. The key mantra? Don’t rush. There are tons of sales automation softwares being marketed as the best, but you have to be patient and judicious in your selection. 

Here are some steps to follow:

1. Analyzing the current sales process: Analyze your current sales process to find out which tasks are taking up most of the valuable time. Next step is to carefully consider whether that particular process can be automated. That is, without any negative repercussions. 

2. Define your sales goals: Randomly automating sales processes can put your sales team in troubled waters. Create a blueprint of what end goals you expect out of automation in sales. 

3. Choose the right tools: In the ever-expanding universe of online sales automation tools, you might find yourself lost in a sea of options. Take time to try out as many options as possible and check which ones work best for your business. 

4. Form a core automation group: Make a core group with Sales Ops executives who can keep an eye out while implementing the best sales automation softwares. This way, you will always have a bunch of insiders with the technical knowledge who can take care of glitches. 

5. Train sales reps: It is crucial to train sales reps whenever any new sales automation tool is implemented. This will ensure they do not face any roadblocks adjusting to the new way.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, using sales automation is like having a secret weapon for sales success. It helps you save time, get more organized, and focus on what really matters—closing deals. 

From lead management to communication, data entry to activity tracking and setting up a guidance system for your sales process – automation can be useful in more ways than one. 

So, if you're ready to step up your sales game, give automation a shot.