Do you want to reduce your employee’s workload and increase efficiency?

If so, you might want to consider investing in sales automation – a quick and easy solution.

No more hours are wasted on repetitive tasks carried out by individual employees. Instead, it can be utilized much more productively to better sell to customers.

In this article, you will learn about sales automation, how it works and look over some sales automation examples.

What is Sales Automation?

Sales automation is the process of using software to eliminate time-consuming repetitive tasks from employees.

This could include anything from syncing all your relevant customer data into a CRM to automated sales calls.

In particular, it is mainly used to reduce time spent by your salespeople on tedious administrative tasks. This is done so more time can be freed up for what they do best – selling.

Ultimately, this will result in a more productive sales team and increased sales. Moreover, it reduces the level of error typically associated with transferring customer data.

Although sales automation can be a humongous asset, it is important that you do not overuse it. Your sales process may become too cold and lifeless with excessive automation.

As a good rule of thumb, you’ll want to use it to supplement human touch, not replace it.

How Does Sales Process Automation Work?

Sales process automations refers to automating various steps in your sales process. This is done so that sales reps can focus more on connecting with and selling to prospects and customers.

Moreover, it is carried out to ensure your sales process is uniform and streamlined. 

Undoubtedly, your team’s sales process is a valuable asset. It exists to provide an iterative process for all members to follow.

Furthermore, a sales process allows you to easily identify gaps to improve upon. Sales automation software streamlines the quality of certain tasks alongside freeing up time and energy for nurturing leads.

7 Sales Automation Examples That You Should Know

Now that you have a grasp of what sales automation is, let’s look at some sales automation examples.

Here are some of the best ways you can automate your sales process:

• Lead Generation

Generating leads is generally considered the first step in the sales process. So, it’s a great place to start with automation.

In fact, software can be used in a variety of ways to generate leads in an automated way. Among the most popular ways are landing pages and pop-up forms. 

Another increasingly popular option is the addition of chatbots. Chatbots appear when a person visits a web page.

Chatbots are a great example of how sales automation can improve the efficiency of companies. It automates the opening message of the customer-facing chat.

As a result, salespeople are not required to repeatedly send the same message. However, when the time comes to warm up a lead, they can leap into action.

• Lead and Contact Creation

When leads are obtained through any platform, your primary aim is to immediately update them on your CRM. In this way, you’re able to initiate building a connection with them as fast as possible.

However, oftentimes there’s a disparity between collecting a lead’s information and entering it into your CRM manually. Moreover, such data entry can get a bit tiresome.

This is where automation comes in. With an appropriate integration tool, you’ll be able to directly link your lead capture forms. Subsequently, the data will be synced to your CRM automatically.

Overall, this type of automation, in the long run, can save you a great deal of time.

• Prioritization of Leads

Time is a precious yet limited resource. On a daily basis, salespeople need to select the warmest leads and put aside colder ones for later.

Modern sales tools are often equipped to perform lead scoring. This feature is capable of automatically detecting which leads are armest.

As a result, salespeople need not put in extra time to figure that out themselves.

• Sales Emails

Despite the presence of other mediums for connecting with leads, email remains one among the most cost-effective methods. Moreover, email is a sales channel that can be easily automated.

With the assistance of software tools, you can even set up cold emails, consistently nurture leads and more.

In fact, some of the most effective emails are those that are set up based on the actions that your leads take

Moreover, the complexity of your automated email setup is entirely up to you.

• Scheduling Of Meetings

If your business is still scheduling meetings via email, consider using a scheduling tool. This allows you to cut out any unnecessary back-and-forth. 

Most scheduling tools enable your leads to see which dates you’re available over a virtual calendar. All your leads have to do is choose a time for your meeting.

When they do this, you’ll be sent a notification informing you about the newly scheduled meeting/event. Just remember to always keep your schedule updated.

If you want to get the most out of your scheduling tool, you can even use it alongside your CRM.

• User Onboarding

Quite similar to other types of email automation, the user onboarding process can also be automated.

Instead of manually sending introductory emails and email confirmations, a software can do these tasks for you. This then saves more time for your salespeople to focus on more important tasks – selling.

• Invoicing

While invoicing is quite tedious, it is an extremely necessary process without which your company wouldn’t get paid. 

The benefit here is that there’s no possibility that your invoice will lose its human touch, so adding some automation is a great idea. They are just invoices after all.

Furthermore, automated invoicing is common practice for subscription-based businesses or SaaS companies.

Other businesses also have a variety of options for connecting their sales CRM software with their accounting software. Invoices can be created and sent directly from your CRM using these integrations.

Moreover, they spare you from unending email communication with your accountants.

Also read: Recommended sales tools

Conclusion

There are many tasks that can be automated in the sales process, as you have observed. Fortunately, today’s technology makes automating these parts much easier than ever before.

Not only does sales automation help you save time, but it also reduces human error and improves productivity.

Due to the multitude of sales automation tools available, sales teams do not have an excuse to fall behind.

For all these reasons, it’s truly worth considering what parts of your own sales process you can automate. With a little bit of automation, your business too can run smoother than ever.