In the past few years, managers from all industries have been flocking to automation tools to keep up with the competition and make their busy schedules more manageable and save their sales reps from so much trouble.
However, if you’re new to the idea, automations can seem quite daunting and complicated, so we’ve written our Definitive Guide for Sales Automation in 2022 to help you make technology one of your team’s greatest assets.
Sales automation streamlines all kinds of tasks involved in the entire sales process. For example, rather than manually inputting all of your contact details, a form will automatically input all of your lead's data without you or your team lifting a finger.
Besides, you don’t have to send sales reps and pay them additional money for direct interaction with the potential clients, which is not the best option for the normal sales cycle.
Automation software for sales is a savior for your sales team. It’s a series of algorithms that connects your CRM and your tasks. There are a lot of products on the market today that help to automatically assign new jobs, send reminders and notifications, and organize meetings.
By automating your sales process, your sales team gets a massive amount of time that would otherwise be spent on small administrative tasks. It reduces effort put into tasks and allows your team to concentrate on the human side of sales — talking to customers.
You don’t have to involve sales reps into business. Even if you have a sales rep, automation will help him or her work without trouble.
Your sales team members benefit from a sales automation process in the following ways:
It helps align your team’s approach
You get an easy overview of your process
Your data is more consistent
It sends automatic notifications and reminders
Your team becomes more productive with sales process automation
Your customers are more satisfied
Sales automation platforms help you, no matter what you do in business.
When specific repetitive tasks have a chance to be completed automatically, without the need for a salesperson to participate, it means sales automation.
This tool is also known as as sales force automation or web-based sales force automation software.
With sales process automation, you get a possibility to automate numerous aspects of your sales process. They are:
Contact management and clients’ leads;
Sales pipeline management;
Reporting;
E-mails;
Invocing;
Additionl assistance after purchases;
Sales productivity;
Sales data;
Customer data and interaction;
Manual tasks that you can create for your team.
With sales automation solutions, you automate many aspects of your sales process, including lead and contact management, sales pipeline management, reporting, invoicing, post-purchase assistance, additional work of your sales team and more.
What are sales automation benefits?
With tools like Bitrix24, you can automate almost every step in your sales process, for example:
Lead generation;
Automatic replies for calls and emails;
Assign leads;
Create tasks;
Add meetings to calendars;
Trigger email sequences;
Sales team reporting;
Invoicing;
Up to date data;
Sales reports;
Automated sales processes.
With sales automation solutions and active sales managers, you have a possibility to automate many parts of your business, including:
All types of management;
Regular reporting;
Invoicing options;
Post-purchase assistance.
The best sales automation software tools are deeply developed and designed to help you get through numerous business troubles. They will also help you with machine learning to assist in making optimal decisions.
Your sales team will be thankful, becsue they will have more time to communicate with current clients and potential one as a result of the automation, simplification, and mobile support.
Innumerable benefits offered by sales process automation software simplify the sales process and boost productivity. Your sales reps’ work will be simplified and limited to the needed minimum because they will have time to relax and get in touch with the customers.
The primary benefits of sales automation are outlined below, along with brief descriptions of the procedures falling into each category that are usually automatable.
Sales strategy and planning. When real-time data updates and sales forecasting procedures that can be fully automated, together with sales tasks and sales reps, you get 360-degree views of consumer interests.
Marketing sales automation tool. Sales automation tools help you observe real-life changes on leads, contest submissions, and other marketing lead generation campaigns to stick to the touchpoints as a thoughtful businessman.
With marketing automation tools like SMS, communication through social media, and email correspondence you will stay in touch with clients during the whole purchasing process.
You’ll be free from the help of sales reps. It’s a food possibility to concentrate lead generation efforts on the most effective channels and use automation for the identification of the best leads.
Contact management. Maintain up-to-date client records, applying any additions or modifications to the customers’ profiles automatically. Fill customers’ profiles your sales teams, which includes purchase history, preferred methods of interaction, and online data, to minimize attention.
Never forget about 360-degree customer views and customers’ confidence in further interactions with your sales teams.
Sales pipeline automation. Sort and tag leads as they come in automatically. It will help you ensure they are appropriate and timely. You’re are a part of your sales teams with automation based on the lead evaluation criteria that you establish yourself.
They are sources, industry, occupation, and more. Besides, you make priorities among the leads and when they need to be interacted with. You sales reps are not getting involved, which is convenient.
Scheduling. A sales automation tool combined with a calendar to quickly set up sales tasks and appointments with clients based on their availability.
Our guide for sales automation would not be complete without first focusing on your customer relationship manager. Your CRM is the focal point of all your team's activity, and the best software will log all your contact's details along with every message, call, email interaction, and more.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, which controls the sales process, automations, customer relationship management and permits adjustments and rule-setting, is integrated with sales automation technologies. Although sales tools aren't always crucial in your CRM, it's still a good idea to have everything in one location since it tends to boost productivity.
A mini guide for sales automation in your CRM
The advantages of a good CRM are pretty much limitless. From an individual perspective, it cuts out small repetitive tasks by automatically registering a lead's activity so you have no fear of things falling through the cracks or being incorrectly uploaded. With all of that taken care of, your team can concentrate on the tasks that require a more human touch.
On a team level, your cloud-based CRM shares all your data across every team member so if anybody is off sick, a colleague can pick up where they left off with all the information at hand.
Some of the most commonly used CRM automations deal with updating your contacts. For example, when a lead is created, you can automatically assign it to the right sales agent, as well as add them to a segmented list based on age range, profession, product they are interested in, or any other objective you want to focus on.
We’ll now go into more detail on some of the more complex aspects of automation that you can use in your daily schedule.
It is a set of tasks that take you from the initial contact with a lead to the final stage of a deal — and often beyond. We’ve included funnels in our guide for sales automation because they provide a full circle of interconnected tasks so your team doesn’t have to worry about what their next step is.
Your sales funnels bridge the gap between your CRM and your project management tools. Within your project management software, you can create all the tasks that make up a funnel and assign deadlines and responsible people as necessary. Any changes or updates to a task will trigger a notification to all those involved and each funnel is saved as a template, ready to go whenever you need it.
As a manager, you can create a variety of automation tools that are each specific to a certain series of tasks. For example, you can set up a funnel to deal with a lead who has downloaded some of your materials, and another for those with specific questions.
Dependencies
Dependencies is one of the best ways to connect a sales funnel because they automatically assign a new task once one is completed. You can even modify the triggers so one task only begins when another has already begun, or one begins only when two others have finished.
Dependencies automation tools don’t just work for each individual’s workflow though. For example, once a sales agent creates a quote, your finance department can be automatically notified in order to sign off on it before the client receives it.
Lead generation
Our guide for sales automation will now talk you through the best practices in lead generation with automated processes as a high priority. We'll break it down into two sections: active and passive options.
Active lead generation
Although active lead generation involves you reaching out to potential clients, there are still ways you can boost your productivity through automation.
Social media
Social media is one of the key areas where you should focus your efforts with direct messages. With integrations to your CRM, you can choose your target audience and send out a pre-approved message automatically. If they respond, your team will receive a notification and can take over to answer any queries and provide more information. At the same time, your CRM will compile data taken from their social media account to give you a fuller picture of who you are dealing with.
Warming up cold leads
You have to be careful with cold emailing due to data protection laws, however, you can message users who once showed interest but have been inactive for a while. CRMs allow you to automatically populate smart lists of contacts who haven't been active in a timeframe you set.
Once you have your list, you can prepare email sequences to reawaken their interest. These sequences can be triggered automatically once a contact becomes "cold" according to your pre-set parameters.
Passive lead generation
One of the simplest lead generation techniques in our guide for sales automation is through forms on your website or landing pages. Tempt your audience with a downloadable document that you will send to their email once they fill in a form.
Your forms will automatically populate your CRM with everything you have requested, such as a name, an email address, a telephone number, and any other fields that are important to you, such as a job title. With all that information at hand, you can begin trickling your marketing emails to nudge your users towards a deal.
Chat bots
There are of course times when potential leads aren't looking for more information, but an answer to a question they have.
With chat bots as a widget on your website, you can provide an easy way for leads to get in touch without clogging up your phone lines. Ask for an email address then automate the first few responses so you have an idea of what your lead wants to discuss before allowing your team to take over.
Chat bots have a huge advantage over phone calls in that one sales agent can handle multiple chats at the same time for a higher volume of leads. With the email address set at the beginning, you've already got a means of contacting your lead and your CRM will automatically record your interaction so you can look back at it later.
Bitrix24 is an all-in-one business tool that covers every aspect of your automation, from lead generation and nurturing to a powerful CRM and video calls that your team will use to contact your leads.
Email marketing is still one of the top contenders when it comes to your sales process. The sheer volume of content you can send to your entire database — or certain segments — boggles the mind, and all of this is down to a few handy automations.
Leading the way in our guide for sales automation is personalization. Rather than sending out cringe-inducing messages starting with “Dear valued customer”, you can include each individual’s specific name, city, job position, and so much more. Automatic personalization allows you to send the kind of messages that people actually want to open without manually editing each email before you send it.
Templates are those niggly little paragraphs you find yourself including in every email response. The top automated email marketing tools allow you to set these paragraphs in advance and include them in your emails at the click of a button. This can cut out a huge heap of time — and a lot of frustration — when you’ve got a seemingly endless list of tasks piling up.
Make sure to include personalization tokens in your templates. Even though you’re automating your work, your users don’t need to know that.
Now you’ve created your killer emails with personalized fields, it’s time to wait until they're ready to go and press “send”. Wrong.
Automated sequences take your leads all the way through your funnel until they’re at the stage where they’re ready to talk to your team. The top CRMs give you the option of sending a series of emails, triggered either by an action taken by your user or simply in a timed order.
You might think analytics has no place in a guide for sales automation, but once you scratch the surface, you’ll see there are countless automatic processes going on behind the scenes.
With the right sales automation tools, your monthly newsletters and dripped marketing emails will give you valuable feedback on how your emails are performing, from your open rate and bounce rate to which links have led to the most traffic. All of this is compiled into one easy report you can download and view on a monthly or quarterly basis.
As part of our sales automation guide, we must point out that too much automation can be a bad thing. If your customers feel they are constantly talking to a computer, they will feel undervalued and frustrated, so now comes the point where it is over to your team.
Once your leads have reached the right stage of your sales funnel, you’ll want to offer a face and a name to strike up a real rapport. The best way to do this is through a meeting, whether on the phone, via a video call, or even in person.
Include a meeting scheduler in your emails so leads can pick a date and time to get things moving. There’s no need to worry about noting down all your commitments — your team calendar will block out that time automatically and send you a notification as a reminder. Like so many of the benefits in our Definitive Guide for Sales Automation in 2022, automatic meeting scheduling cuts out those small yet time consuming tasks, allowing you and your team to focus on completing deals.
Just because we're now entering the more "human" side of things, it doesn't mean there's no room for automation. At this stage in your sales process, make sure your team is fully equipped with the right communication tools and a guide on the best approach. Store it in a collaborative document for easy access and be sure to update it whenever you discover new best practices. The best sales automation tools will automatically send notifications when there are changes to your guide — saving you clogging up your team's inboxes with long, drawn-out explanations.
As a manager, you can record calls for later analysis. If you find you have sticking points that cause a lot of your deals to fall through, you can pinpoint the stage in your and get to work identifying the cause.
So simple yet so time consuming — writing up your quotes and invoices by hand is one of the most obvious tasks that you need to automate for a smooth running system. Once you're at this stage, you need to act fast to avoid losing your deal, so our guide for sales automation puts a priority on outsourcing your quotes and deals to the algorithms.
Gone are the days where finalizing a deal was the end of your workflow. Now it's all about ensuring repeat business.
If you've purchased anything online recently, you'll surely have received a follow-up email shortly after asking if you're happy with your product and perhaps if you'd like to rate your experience and share it on social media.
Customer care is a key part of our sales automation guide and the good news is that you won't have to manually input a reminder and write up an email for every deal. As part of your email templates, you can automate a post-deal email that includes your customer's details and the name of the product you've sold — all taken directly from your CRM.
With our Definitive Guide for Sales Automation, you should have a much clearer idea of how you can increase productivity and provide a professional service to all your contacts. From saving your sales rep team time to ensuring you make the best of every opportunity, an automated sales process is now an essential tool for teams across all industries.
Bitrix24 is an all-in-one business tool that covers every aspect of your automation, and nurturing to a powerful CRM and even the emailing, social media messaging, and phone and video calls that your sales rep team will use to contact your leads.
More than 10,000,000 teams have already started using our platform to streamline their sales automation process and so much more.
Get started with Bitrix24 for free and discover how it can boost your productivity and put your mind at ease.
Bitrix24 as partially a sales automation platform offering a ton of opportunities.
Let’s talk about the additional details of the benefits of sales automation. Because of the incorporation of these Bitrix24 automation tools (resulting in marketing automation CRM), there is an opportunity to become acquainted with the preferences of customers regarding your products and services.
Here are Bitrix24 automation tools offered at present:
Improved consumer experience with convenient tariff plans and the facility of the program for customers and your sales reps.
Convenient, 24/7 customer technical support with sales reps when needed.
Various blog posts and motivation methods as automation tools are available.
When it comes to segmentation and sales pipeline, this kind of automation tools is used to achieve the objective of finding possible customers and classifying them according to similar demands in order to determine their future characterization without any sales rep involved.
Regarding targeting in CRM marketing, this concept refers to the process of choosing consumer segmentation based on factors such as profitability, service provider capability, and rivalry rate in order to achieve the desired customer outcome.