Whenever you visit a store, what is the first thing you do? You look at the products, see whether they fit your requirements and then purchase it. No customer goes directly to the payment section.
There is a well-defined way of how the buyer’s journey takes place. To brief it down, it goes in three steps. These include attraction, engagement and then sales. This means that the bottom line of the buyer’s journey is sales.
Before this, businesses need to take several steps to connect and convince the leads. It does not matter how good your pitching is, and how convinced the consumer is. Every aspect boils down to the point of a seamless sales process. How does one make the sales integrated and easier? A simple answer to this is sales process automation.
What is sales process automation? What are the best ways to do so? What are its benefits? Are there sales automation tools for the same? Let us answer all your questions.
What is Sales Process Automation?
Sales process automation involves the streamlining and automation of laborious and tiresome tasks. Businesses do this to enhance workflow efficiency and employee productivity. Further, it also plays a key role in cutting down the finances. The automation of the sales pipeline practically uses technology for sales improvisation. It further allows the team to focus on administrative tasks. After all, a sales representative is the one who can either make or break the deal.
Sales automation involves the management of the responsibilities of the sales team. It bridges the gap your business is lacking in. Which key areas should the business focus on?
Best ways for a sales process automation:
The sales process is no less than an asset to the business. The way in which you use this asset to your advantage is what matters. To eliminate the iterative tasks, the business opts for sales process automation. Which key areas must the business focus on? Here are the best ways to generate the desired results.
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Emails and marketing automation
As per the reports, sales representatives spend about 21% of their time with email tasks. This calls for the need of email automation. Emails are the most common form of communication in all business aspects. But, what emails must one send? What should the format be? Before you get started with email automation, it is important to figure out which are the iterative ones. While some emails do require personal responses, the majority of them can be automated.
One must figure out which emails to send through automation. These usually include welcome emails, follow-ups, thank you emails, etc. These further vary depending on several factors. It includes audience segmentation, buyer’s journey, the interest of customers and so on.
Not just emails, marketing plays a quintessential to generate sales. So, to avoid the iterative tasks, the team can automate the marketing process. This involves understanding the audience and attracting them to buy the product.
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Lead prioritization and management
Your business may get ample leads. But, that does not mean that all of them are potential leads. While some may be the disinterested ones, others might actually be keen towards your business. It is important to sort the leads and prioritize them accordingly. To do so, you can opt for sales automation tools. Understand the bottlenecks in case of low conversion rates. Work on these aspects. You can further create a lead score model. This will help you understand the lead well and set up lead thresholds alongside.
To improve the response time for leads, one can distribute them depending on several factors. This plays an essential in the improvement of the lead conversion ratio and sales efficiency.
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Pipeline management
As important it is to focus on the leads, it is equally to get the tasks done. The sales process automation allows you to schedule and manage regular tasks. The organization of administrative tasks makes a small contribution towards the big business growth. The tasks for pipeline management include:
- Data entry: It involves the automation of iterative tasks. These include sending emails, making calls, lead enrichment tasks, etc.
- Scheduling appointments and meetings: Automation eliminates the hassle of setting meetings with leads or the team. Several sales automation tools can be used. These tools send automatic reminders to the meetings invitees. Further, it also sends a trigger reminder notification or email.
- Invoice generation: It is an important aspect of the sales process. The creation of an invoice for the lead is surely a time-consuming task. When the payment is made, or sales are closed, the sales automation tools automatically generate the invoice.
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Reports and analytics
As tiresome the reports, they are quintessential for every business. The reports and analytics provide an overview of the sales process. How well the revenue targets have been achieved. And above all what are the outputs of all the efforts put in. Manual collation of data is not just tiring, but can also be confusing. In case of even a single mistake, the outcome will be affected majorly. Automation not just eliminates the manual tasks, but it also improves the performance of sales representatives. Additionally, it also helps the team in understanding the areas to focus on and make improvisations.
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Management of orders
Order management does not involve only one team. Rather, it involves the role of several teams including the financial team, sales team and customer support team as well. The order administration also involves the stakeholders. If your business is seeing exponential growth, the sales automation tools can help you manage it all. It allows you to seamlessly manage the orders through every step.
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Sales team organization
Last but not the least, sales automation tools help you organize the team. While sales managers have administrative task management in hand, the sales management team is responsible for managing customers. When the sales team is organized, it allows them to make decisions quickly and effectively. With sales process automation, the complete process is unified and organized.
Which is the best Sales automation tools platform?
With the cut-throat digital competition, there are ample sales automation tools available. But, why choose a sales automation platform. Here are some of its benefits:
- Elimination of human errors and manual data entry.
- Effective management and administration for productivity.
- Sales are all about timing. It is important to close the deal when the customer is convinced. Sales automation tools exactly help you in doing that.
- Allows the managers to focus on the core administrative tasks.
Conclusion:
To summarize, every step of the buyer’s journey is crucial. But, all the efforts make sense only if you get the desired results. To sustain in the digital world, it is essential for businesses to integrate the processes with automation tools. One of them is sales automation. With all said and done, sales automation has its own set of benefits to offer. It is important to take complete advantage of these tools in hand to expand your business. After all, it is all about business growth and high sales.
