10 Ways Automation Can Help Your Sales Function

Automation has become all the hype, drawing even more attention with the dramatic economic impacts of COVID-19. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have revolutionized automation technologies, paving the way for an extraordinary shift in how businesses operate. What started out with manufacturing has now extended to many other areas, from marketing and customer services to finance and procurement.

Sales, in particular, has been radically transformed with new automation technologies. And its benefits have been touted by experts for both large and small organizations. But how can it support the sales function of your business? Let’s find out.

What is automation?

Automation is about applying technologies to minimize human intervention. And it’s not just limited to business operations. The average consumer is also benefiting from automation technologies on a daily basis—from smart fridges and microwave ovens to home automation systems such as smart speakers, thermostats, and home security.

Historically, it’s been viewed as a negative omen and commonly associated with job losses. But in fact, it has led to the creation of many new roles, providing opportunities in emerging areas. According to the World Economic Forum, machines and automation will create 97 million new jobs by 2025.

But the benefits of automation extend far beyond that. It could provide significant cost advantages in the long term, improve quality, safety, efficiency, and productivity, minimize human errors, infuse greater accuracy and precision, and free up employees to perform critical functions where they can contribute most.

But despite that, some businesses are still slow to adopt these technologies, citing high costs, data privacy and security, skill shortages, and employee resistance as some of their top concerns.

However, the advantages of automation are hard to ignore. And resisting further could mean compromising business competitiveness.

10 ways sales automation can help your business

The sales function is one major area that could tremendously benefit from automation. But it’s currently lagging behind many other functions such as IT, finance, and supply chain in terms of adoption.

Yet, according to a McKinsey report, over 30% of sales activities can be automated. There are many advanced tools that could radically improve the entire sales value chain. And the incremental benefits could be significant for a business of any scale.

But how exactly can automation support your sales function and overall business growth?

1. Prospecting leads

Sales teams spend a staggering amount of time building lists of prospective customers. It’s a time-intensive manual task that can distract them from areas their focus is most needed.

But automation tools can help bring greater efficiency to this tedious process. They can help build and manage massive databases, and instantly create lead lists based on a range of criteria—from company size to the prospect’s seniority within their organization.

Automation software can also help segment and prioritize prospects based on, for example, sales scores. And this can improve the quality of the leads and assure better conversion rates. So, your sales team can spend their time more productively and minimize dead leads.

2. Email communications

Emails are an essential communication tool for sales reps and can take up a considerable portion of their productive time. But the standard generic email will not get your prospect’s attention either. According to Experian, adding a personal touch to your emails can raise transaction rates by as much as six times.

With email automation, sales teams get to use pre-designed message templates. They are developed based on tested content and can be easily adapted to each customer with a few personalizations. So, they can improve the overall quality and effectiveness of email communications.

Moreover, these automation tools can minimize errors and significantly reduce the time spent on drafting emails from scratch.

3. Contacting prospects

To have more customers in the sales funnel, your team needs to make more phone calls. But in an age where cutting down process time, even by two seconds, could provide a clear edge over competitors, the old school ways of noting a number and manually dialing it just won’t work.

This is why many businesses have turned to automation tools to minimize the dialing time. These can even match prospects with sales reps based on pre-assigned criteria to ensure the best possible outcome for the customer and your business.

4. Call dispositions

Noting down call outcomes and next steps of action are an important part of a sales call. But taking notes is a hassle. It’s time consuming and can also lead to more manual data-entry tasks when it comes to reporting outcomes. And misplacing these notes could become a nightmare—a risk your team must avoid at any cost.

But call logging software can bring ease and efficiency to this process. They allow salespeople to make quick notes online or select call dispositions from pre-assigned menus. And this will make it easier to safely store important call information, retrieve them quickly to follow up, and share them among teams. It can even help categorize calls and segment prospect databases.

5. Analysing calls

Analyzing sales calls is important for sales reps, supervisors, as well as trainers. It helps assess call effectiveness and identify any training needs.

And call analysis tools won’t just record calls and log their details. They use AI technologies to provide in-depth data about conversations. For example, they can evaluate important words and topics touched upon during a call. This is useful for various purposes such as training and coaching, and to ensure that sales teams follow standard sales guidelines.

Intelligent software such as Gong, SalesLoft, and Chorus have revolutionized this space by providing deep insights to improve call efficiency.

6. Front-end customer support

Automation is no longer just about back-end processes. Even front-end, customer-facing activities are benefiting from automation technologies such as chatbots.

These intelligent tools can help streamline customer engagement with improved consistency in messaging. And not only that, but they can also provide fast, around the clock, automated customer support and save valuable time for sales reps by eliminating routine front-end customer-related activities. Chatbots are also cost effective. By 2022, they are expected to yield $8 billion in savings for businesses through automation.

7. Simplifying voicemail

Studies show that sales teams spend almost two-thirds of their productive time in non-revenue-generating activities. That’s a significant amount of time that could be better used elsewhere. So, eliminating even the simplest of tasks that do not directly contribute to a productive workday could make a tangible difference.

One such area that deserves attention is voicemail. Salespeople are spending nearly 15% of their time leaving voicemail messages. So, automating this simple function can bring a sizeable time saving.

This is where voicemail drop software becomes important. They can help your team pre-record messages and instantly send them to the prospect’s voicemail box when a call goes unanswered. This enables them to quickly move on to the next prospect and increase their call efficiency.

8. Content for communications

Sales teams need to draw up a large amount of content during the customer acquisition process—from product information to sales proposals and agreements. And preparing them manually is time consuming and can increase the risk for errors. And the cost of a simple mistake could be a lost sale.

But automation tools can help ease this burden by managing relevant content types so you can quickly access what’s required. And intelligent software can even analyze and provide the most relevant content based on a range of pre-assigned criteria, such as buyer behavior and location. They can even send automated follow-up messages and prompt prospects towards action.

9. Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an essential part of a sales role. It’s important for a number of reasons. It can help build long-term relationships with customers by providing a more personalized service. An effective CRM can also support upselling and cross-selling, encourage repeat business, and reactivate customers who have not purchased in the recent past.

A CRM tool can help you store all customer data in one place — from purchase records to past communications. And this will serve as a valuable information source to quickly retrieve high-quality, in-depth data.

10. Data analytics

The more data you have and the better their quality, the more effective your decision-making process will become. But manual handling of data can slow down this process and increase room for error and data loss.

And automated data analyzing tools can infuse efficiency to this process by providing real-time data about the sales value chain. This will be invaluable to measure sales KPIs, make quick course corrections, and coach and train the team. These tools can also offer top-level reports for senior management and detailed reports for the sales team.

Put simply, instant reports and dashboards can make the entire process of data tracking, monitoring, and reporting fast, seamless, efficient, and accurate.

The bottom line is, sales automation can improve the efficiency of your sales processes, and can dramatically free up time for your team so they can focus on closing more sales. From lead prospecting to conversions and closing deals, automation can be seamlessly integrated into every part of your sales value chain. And with its increased adoption across industries, how well you adopt and adapt could be a pivotal determinant of your business’s future success.