Any company or business, whether new or established, aims at growing its client portfolio with every fresh interaction it has with the market. This can be quite tough to achieve especially if sales representatives spend most of their days doing routine tasks that can easily be automated to save time and energy.
If you’re facing this predicament, you’ll be glad to know that there are hundreds of automation tools on the market today and all you need is just to find several that suit key areas of your business. The ultimate goal is to automate every process that you deem appropriate ranging from your emails to social media management, and scheduling meetings among others.
For this post, we show you four ways you can integrate automation into your sales processes to save on both time and money.
Emailing
The amount of time business people spend every day drafting new emails or replying to existing threads is astonishing. While not every email should be automated, you certainly need to assess those that you send frequently to find out if you can automate some.
Look for those repetitive emails you send to people regularly and which take significant amount of time when done manually. If only a few customization are required for each user, you may want to consider using tools such as email autoresponders to automate the process.
Some of the email types to prioritize for this process include:
- Welcome emails sent to new clients/subscribers
- Follow up emails to listings that have not made any efforts to communicate back
- Emails concerning upcoming meetings
- Appreciation emails to new users/buyers
Reporting
Reports are an integral part of any sales process. They are the backbone of your work process that show your superiors what you’ve been up to and if there is any progress on your end. While reports are critical, creating them manually can consume a significant amount of time, often leaving you with limited time to find new leads. In most cases, you’ll find that your days are spent doing trivial tasks such as keeping your spreadsheets updated with the latest information concerning meetings, calls, emails, and any sales you make.
However, it doesn’t always have to be this way.
You can set a CRM automation software to gather this information for you on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and even yearly basis. This way, you do not have to spend so much time compiling reports and most other files. Instead, your work is reduced to reviewing and confirming that the information included is correct before you can submit these files to your bosses.
Making calls
Yes, you heard that right. Making calls can also be automated. As you possibly know, a lot of sales work entail juggling between writing and listening whenever one is on a call with a prospect or an existing client. Obviously, it can prove pretty difficult to multitask, and this could translate to poorly done work or a situation where the sales rep continuously asks the listener on the other end of the line to repeat themselves for clarification.
To avoid these hassles, consider recording all your calls automatically and later reviewing the records to gather all the information you need. A few tools to help you with calls automation include CallRail, Sudo, and Tellwise among others.
Lead tracking
It can be quite costly to follow every step that your prospective client takes, especially with so many social sites and other platforms at their disposal. Even then, you want to be among the first ones to contact prospects when they’re ready to take action if you’re to increase your chances of closing more deals.
Unfortunately, considering that a typical salesperson follows up on more than one prospective lead at any given time, it can be overwhelming to do this manually. This is where an automation tool such as Hubspot Outlook integration by PieSync comes into play. With it, you can significantly reduce the amount of work you do trying to track customer activities and behavior on different online platforms. It also enables you to easily contact those that are at a point of purchasing your products or services. Remember, you want to be the first to know what is up their sleeves and do timely follow ups before your competition does.
Final Take
It goes without saying that each company needs to invest in automation software if they want to close in on most of their deals. Sure, different processes require unique tools which makes automation in general appear costly. However, as a business owner, you need to consider the amount of time and money that goes down the drain in the name of working using outdated tools or manual methods. This alone should help to convince you to spend more on automation so you can gain even more.
Author: Ellen De Beul
Ellen loves digital marketing and storytelling. As content marketer she makes sure our blog is full of interesting stories, tips and case-studies. When offline, she likes to climb, surf, take pictures and discover the hidden parts of Ghent. Gets a bit annoyed when hungry but we’re working on that
