What is Sales Automation: A Guide to Increasing Revenue

If you are not already using sales automation software, you are wasting valuable time and money.

Imagine a group of tireless employees doing all the routine, repetitive tasks that keep your business running. Meanwhile, other members of your team are focused on important projects like closing sales. Working together, these teams keep your business operations coordinated and efficient.

Don’t have the budget to hire a whole new team of dedicated assistants who can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? This is where sales automation comes in.

What is Sales Automation?

Sales automation is the use of sales automation tools to perform predictable and routine manual tasks.

Consider sending invoices and follow-up emails or answering customer questions. These administrative tasks can take up a huge amount of valuable employee time. And they often need to be done monthly, weekly, or even daily.

Outsourcing these tasks to sales automation software improves your team’s productivity. And it costs a lot less than hiring a new assistant who loves repetitive work. You can automate up to a third of all sales tasks!

What are the benefits of using sales automation software?

In short, sales automation software increases your productivity and revenue. Companies using sales force automation report 10-15% efficiency gains and 10% increase in sales.

Despite these huge benefits, only one in four companies have automated sales tasks. This means that three out of four companies spend more time than they need to!

If you’re one of them, here’s how sales automation can contribute to your success.

Optimize and grow your sales funnel

Automation tools can address important (but time-consuming) elements of the sales funnel. Collecting customer data and email addresses? No problem. Sending personalized emails? Light wind.

Automation software can even make product recommendations and guide customers through checkout.

Make sure prospects don’t fail

First impressions count. If you forget to connect with new potential customers, it could cost you their business. However, if you’re sending all those follow-up emails yourself, it’s bound to happen.

Increasing customer satisfaction

The human touch matters to your customers. Some business owners fear they will lose this important element if they rely on automation. But the right automation strategy can have the opposite effect. With more time, your team can provide faster, better support to their customers when needed.

Your entire organization has the same data

Sales automation tools integrate with your customer service software to keep all the important details in one place. Centralizing sales data ensures that your team members work together. This way you can build on each other’s efforts instead of stepping on each other’s toes.

Compare your performance

In addition to performing tasks, automation software can report on them. Get important KPIs like qualified leads or new subscribers when you need them. These analytics can help you track growth and set goals. Best of all, you won’t have to waste precious time making them.

10 Ways to Use Sales Automation Tools

The following are just some of the most important tasks that sales force automation can solve for sales reps. At the end of this post, we’ve put together a set of tools that can do all this and more.

Data collection

Data collection is critical but time consuming. Adding new leads to your CRM manually can take all day. Sales automation software can take care of collecting data and updating customer information. You will need a tool that integrates with all your lead sources in one single database.

intelligence service

Once you get qualified leads, you need to reach out to them. Perhaps you are hesitant to automate the search. After all, these emails are important. They should be warm and personal, not robotic. They should set the right tone and keep your potential customers interested.

Luckily, you can automate a personalized email for each prospect with the data you collect. You can also set up triggers, such as contacting potential customers who respond to an invitation to an event. This ensures that every message from your brand arrives exactly when your potential customer is most interested and engaged.

Lead scoring

Only 10-15% of your leads will turn into sales. To maximize your ROI, you should focus your efforts on your most valuable leads. Sales automation tools can help you generate leads, evaluate them, and direct your efforts to where they are most likely to pay off in the sales funnel.

Planning

Planning a simple call can often seem as complicated as planning a rocket launch. You need to consider calendars, obligations, time zones, legal holidays, moon phases… the list goes on. Automating the meeting scheduling process is the way to go. You can send a potential client one link and they will choose a time that is convenient for both of you. Or let your customers schedule their in-store appointments using a tool like Heyday.

Source: Rise

Email templates and automation

Email marketing offers the best bang for your buck, bringing in $42 for every $1 spent. But 47% of sales teams still send emails manually. Entering every email and contact details to schedule a sales call is a huge waste of time. Copying and pasting is faster, but sloppy. The best solution is an email template that can be filled with the client’s individual details for a personal touch.

The sales automation software can create and send these email campaigns for you. The software can also scale as your small business grows. You can send automated messages to 100 or 10,000 leads at the same time. Then, when the clients are ready to talk to the person, you can intervene.

Order management

If you’re using an e-commerce platform like Shopify, it’s easy to automate your order management. There are many order management applications that integrate directly into the platform. They can generate invoices, shipping information, and shipping updates.

And when an order is completed, you can also automate a customer satisfaction survey!

Customer Service

Automating answers to frequently asked questions saves a lot of time. It also benefits your customers! They can get 24/7 support and get answers faster. One company was able to automate 88% of all customer questions using the Heyday chatbot! It also meant faster support for the 12% of customers who needed a human to take over.

Source: Rise

Social Media Schedule

More than half of Instagram users log in daily. 70% of Facebook users and almost half of Twitter users do the same. Your brand needs to stay active on social media to keep up. Luckily, you don’t have to log into each platform every day to post your updates. You can use a social media management tool like Hootsuite.

With Hootsuite, you can schedule posts at the best times for each platform without having to spend all day working on TikTok. (Instead, you can spend all day on TikTok for fun.)

It’s time to remind you that any automation requires human control. This is the lesson Drag Race learned after Queen Elizabeth II passed away shortly before this tweet was posted:

CHECK YOUR SCHEDULED TWITS!!!!! pic.twitter.com/Hz92RFFPih

— ancient man (@goulcher) September 8, 2022

As always, automation works in harmony with your team. You want to follow your channels and interact with your audience. And don’t forget to delete any inconvenient pre-scheduled messages.

Offers and contracts

Automation can even help you close the deal. Instead of entering every sentence, the automation software can extract key data from your CRM and use it to populate the template. It also minimizes the risk of human error.

These tools can also control documents. You will receive a notification when your customer views and subscribes. Save even more time by automating reminders.

Reports

Regular reports are important for keeping track of your performance, but they can be difficult to create. Instead, use software tools with built-in analytics to measure your business activity. This could be social media reports, chatbot analytics, or sales data.

12 Best Sales Automation Software for 2022

There are many tools out there that promise to transform your business. Here is our selection of the most indispensable options.

1. Heyday

Heyday is an AI voice assistant designed to support your customers every step of the way in their shopping journey. Heyday helps customers find the products they need, answers frequently asked questions, and provides order updates. It can also support your sales team by capturing leads and collecting data. It integrates with all your messaging channels to support customers everywhere.

Heyday also provides powerful built-in analytics to improve your business strategy. Learn more about your customers with every interaction and direct your efforts to achieve the greatest result.

2. Houtsuit

Social media has never been more important and time consuming if you post manually. Hootsuite can do the hard work of scheduling and publishing on every platform. In addition, it provides you with the most important social media analytics. It also consolidates all your social media profiles into one clear, organized dashboard.

In addition to publishing, Hootsuite also allows you to track audience engagement. You can tune in to important customer conversations and coordinate your team’s responses. In addition, your sales team can use Hootsuite to find and connect with new leads.

And as social commerce becomes more important, you can use Hootsuite to sell products right on Instagram!

Try Hootsuite free for 30 days!

3. Leading genius

LeadGenius helps sales and marketing teams find valuable leads. With LeadGenius, you can automate data collection tasks using the Flow browser extension. This allows you to quickly find new leads and update existing contacts.

Source: LeadGenius

And with DataGenius, you can search the web for accounts and contacts that match your target audience. This means less time spent searching for new clients and more quality leads. Do you know the phrase “Work smarter, not harder?”This is exactly what it means.

4. Overlap

Overloop (formerly Prospect.io) is a sales automation tool for outbound campaigns. This allows your sales team to scale their customer acquisition efforts across multiple channels and analyze their results. From there, you can create custom streams to maximize your results.

Source: Overloop

Your team can also use Overloop to automate recruitment and business development. Plus, it integrates with other automation tools for a unified workflow.

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Where to find new perspectives? Well, the world’s largest professional network is just the beginning.

With over 830 million members, the people you’re looking for are already on LinkedIn. And with Sales Navigator, you can find leads with customizable targeted search tools. Manage leads on the platform or integrate with CRM.

6. Gong

Why do some interactions lead to a deal, while others lead to a dead end? With Gong, you can stop being surprised. It captures and analyzes your interactions with customers, providing data on the most effective tactics and strategies. In short, it turns the art of customer acquisition into a science.

Gong can help every member of your sales team become a star by creating data-driven workflows. Identify weak points in your sales funnel and eliminate them with clear and actionable steps.

7. Calendar

Get rid of nightmares about a constant schedule. With Calendly, your prospects and customers can make appointments with just one click. You never have to send another email asking “Are you free on Monday afternoon to call?”Not to mention the inevitable follow-up: “Okay, how about Tuesday?”

Source: Kalendli

Calendly, founded in 2013, exploded during the pandemic. (Perhaps this has something to do with the sudden proliferation of virtual meetings.) In 2020 alone, the user base has grown by an incredible 1180%!

It integrates directly with your calendar so you can define your availability windows. You can also collect contact details and send follow-up messages automatically.

8. Sales department

84% of customers value experience as much as product quality. To stay competitive, you need to provide a first-class customer experience. That’s why you need a CRM.

CRM helps all your departments work together by centralizing customer data. This means that everyone has the same information and can see what actions have been taken. From the client’s point of view, this is smoother and more coordinated support at every stage.

Source: sales force

And Salesforce is the top-rated CRM for good reason. It is infinitely customizable to your business needs and integrates with all the other tools you rely on. Plus, you can automate repetitive processes like emails, approvals, and data entry.

9. Hubspot Sales

Another powerful CRM option, perfect for teams of any size. Hubspot Sales Hub coordinates every step of your sales funnel, allowing you to track and measure your team’s performance.

Source: hubspot

You can develop customers and leads automatically using customizable workflows. Spend less time signing up leads and sending emails and increase your revenue and response rate at the same time.

For small businesses, Sales Hub offers free and affordable monthly plans. You can scale as you grow by using your limited resources wisely.

10. Client point

ClientPoint simplifies the process of creating and sharing documents. These include contracts, offers and information packages.

With ClientPoint, you can also get per-document analytics and set up automatic alerts and reminders to close a deal.

11. Davar

Most likely, your sales team works a lot with email. Yesware helps you streamline and focus your efforts by tracking the results of your communications. It integrates directly with your email client so it doesn’t feel like an extra step in your process. In fact, you don’t have to change anything at all: Yesware collects information for you and then makes it easy to share your thoughts with your team.

Yesware also lets you save your best emails as templates so you can replicate your success. It also includes features such as scheduling and sending email.

12. Lock

Zapier is an app for apps. This allows you to link one application to another, creating a seamless, automated workflow. For example, you can automate personalized emails to new customers by creating a “Zap”between Shopify and Gmail. Or send weekly social media reports to your team using Zapier to connect Hootsuite and Slack. With over 5,000 apps, the possibilities are almost endless.