Close the deal at all times. Sounds familiar?
Always try to close. Do you recognize it?
Sales managers are always telling their reps that they need to close more deals. Still, many haven’t done what they needed to do to automate sales, which has caused them to fall behind.
How can you always close if you’re stuck at your desk entering data?
Sales automation is the key to getting more money in the door. At the moment, sales reps only talk to prospects for a third of their productive hours. The rest of their time is spent on day-to-day tasks like entering data, finding new customers, planning team meetings, and making schedules. But think about how much more your business could sell if you freed up the other two-thirds of your team’s time with sales automation.
By automating your sales team, you’ll let reps focus on what you and they care about most: building meaningful relationships with prospects that lead to more sales and business growth.
So let’s dig in.
Table of contents
A. Improve your reporting
Sales and marketing should work together like a well-oiled machine to get the most done. For example, could you make better sales predictions if you knew how many calls it took your best salespeople to close a deal? If you knew if a prospect had opened your latest marketing email, would you know how to talk to them better? With sales automation, you can get reports that answer all of these and other questions.
If you look at detailed records of past calls and emails, you will know how many calls you need to make to reach your sales goals. You’ll know which of your email templates are the most successful.
You must be able to measure the sales engagement of a prospect, an account, or all of your prospects. Use this information in your sales process so you can focus on the tasks that are most likely to lead to a sale.
Look at this information often to see how your prospects react to certain actions. When you understand the data, you can change your sales strategy to appeal to your ideal customer.
B. Save time and improve efficiency
In a study of sales teams, 88 percent of the people who took part said they could use tools that saved them time. This shouldn’t come as a surprise.
If your salespeople close deals over the phone, you can make them more efficient by giving them fewer things to do. For example, phone reps won’t have to spend time writing emails from scratch if you give them tried-and-true templates for each step of the sales process. Use sales automation to try out different messages until you find the best template for a certain touchpoint. Use A/B testing and try out different subject lines and signatures to find out what your audience likes best.
Automated phone sales software can dial phone numbers, play pre-recorded messages when it’s appropriate, and keep track of every phone call your business makes. Reps are much more productive when they do less manual dialing.
C. Educate customers and salespeople with less effort
With sales automation, emails and other forms of communication can be automatically linked to specific call tasks. No one has to remember to send these messages because they run automatically based on set triggers or a set schedule. But give people room to change things. Reps should be able to stop automatic email sends so they can change the message to make it more relevant to a specific prospect.
When sales automation tools are used, both salespeople and customers are automatically shown a better way to do things. You can save your customers’ time and make sure they see exactly what they need to see when they need to see it. Even better, if you want to reach everyone in your market, you can automate your communication. Add this to your account-based marketing strategy by automating a pair of emails and phone calls for each account or group of accounts.
D. Automate lead scoring to focus on high-quality leads
Once you set up automated lead scoring, your sales and marketing teams will thank you. No one should have to sort through leads by hand and try to score each one by hand, which is time-consuming and prone to mistakes. And letting reps score leads as a continuous process can get confusing when different reps have different ideas about what makes a qualified lead.
When everyone agrees on what a qualified lead looks like (things like industry, number of website visits, if they’ve filled out a form, etc. ), it will be easier to define disqualifications and make changes over time. Your factors for scoring will always change. That just means that sales and marketing need to get together again. Talk about what needs to be changed so that your qualified lead criteria are always up-to-date.
By automating this process, sales reps can make sure they spend their time on the right leads. You can also choose to send leads with different quality scores and different messages. Adding this to your automated sales process will help you sell more.
Summary
Sales automation is the key to reaching revenue goals in 2022. Leaders in sales who put time and effort into sales automation now will see their businesses grow as a result.
But it’s not all about growth right away. Sales automation can also help with making long-term strategic decisions. The Your Year in Meeting 2021 report from Tackle found that high-performing leaders who made more money than expected in 2021 were also focused on making their pipelines move faster. Using automated reports and data gathered from efforts to automate in Tackle, they were able to figure out where process improvements should be made.
