The Time Is Now: Increase Your Revenue Through Sales Automation17 min read

Do you feel like your sales team is working overtime on small, tedious tasks? Sales automation can do that work for you, and at a more efficient rate. Research from Inside Sales labs shows that only 36% of sales reps’ time is spent actually selling. The sales industry is constantly changing, as is technology, and sales automation may be just what you need to maximize your efforts. Sales automation is the use of technology to employ tasks a sales team would do manually, giving them more time to dedicate to selling. 

What is Sales Automation?

Sales automation software takes the tedious, time-consuming tasks sales reps, managers, and leaders do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and automates them. Not only does it turbocharge your efficiency, but it also improves accuracy and accelerates your sales process.

Benefits of Sales Automation

• Sales history records within minutes. 
• Calculate variables including conversion rates, win-loss ratios, and lead time. 
• Detailed overview of the activities performed by your sales team with regard to products and services, territories, and customers. 
• Speed up the tracking of your sales life cycles and help you to accomplish your goals on schedule. 

75% of marketers surveyed said they currently use at least one type of marketing automation tool, making automation tools accepted by most marketers. – Social Media Today ‘State of Marketing Automation Survey Report’ (2019). 

5 Types of Sales Automation

There are a variety of ways you can automate your sales tasks, and listed below are five of them. The five types of Sales Automation include automated record creation, automated activity logging, communication automation, lead management automation, and automated guidance. 

1. Automated Record Creation

Sales automation software can immediately create Customer Relationship Management (CRM) records when a visitor to the website fills out a form or scans a business card, saving the sales team from having to do it manually. 

2. Automated Activity Logging

Tasks like logging emails, phone calls, and other customer communications are logged as soon as they happen. This saves hours of work that a sales rep would otherwise have to do on a daily basis. Sales automation also logs details like customer complaints, sales representative’s activities, and sales figures. 

3. Communication Automation

Sales automation can’t replace the value of personal communication, but it can take the time-consuming, less personal communication tasks and do them for you. Communication that can be automated includes: 

• Sales Email Automation
  • Includes targeted email campaigns when a prospect reaches a certain stage in the sales process. 
• Personal Email Sequences
  • Content is personalized and automatically stops when the prospect replies. 
• Meeting Scheduling Tools
  • Save the hassle of long email chains working through days that work for both people, and setup a scheduling tool. With communication automation, you can efficiently schedule meetings by supplying a calendar that prospects can use to select times according to their schedule. 
• Automated Voicemails
  • Sales reps can drop pre-recorded voicemails into someone’s mailbox when they miss a call. 
• Chat bot
  • Chat bot is an easy way to have 24-hour assistance on your site. They can help fix problems, answer questions, and act as a sales streamline by  guiding customers through purchasing.

 4. Lead Management Automation

Lead management automation works to capture leads in a fast, approachable manner. Users are looking for the best and fastest answer to the question. They want to control their experience online, without having to go through a person. Users will do their own browsing, and depending on how they do that, each follow-up will differ. No one wants to receive cookie cutter mass emails, and thanks to lead management automation, they don’t have to. It sends personalized follow ups with prospects based on how they showed interest.

For example, if you add something to your cart on a website and don’t continue to checkout, you may receive an email personalized to what you left in your cart. There may be suggestions for products to go with what you’ve already showed interest in as well. 

Leads will be assigned to sales reps automatically, given the geographic location and their expertise in what products the prospect is looking for. Automating leads is the most efficient and cost effective way to convert them into sales. 

5. Automated Guidance 

Automated guidance walks the customer through the entire sales process. From “what can I help you find today?”, to “how would you like to purchase?”, automated guidance makes it easy for users to find exactly what they’re looking for in a timely manner. You can also include a chat bot on your site, answering any questions specific to the customer’s request. Chat bots can also assist in fixing problems that the customer is experiencing. 

Additional Features

In addition to other marketing automation features, automated research and data entry can be utilized to complete separate automated tasks. 

Automated Research

Sales automation software that can browse the Internet saves a lot of time, and has the potential to find the information you might not have found browsing on your own. It can gather publicly available information and search social media platforms to identify potential customers. iMacros is just one example of this. They can run multiple instances simultaneously, and can be scheduled to run in the background while you work on other things. 

Automated Data Entry

Automated data entry refers to anything that involves typing. It will auto fill names, phone numbers, addresses, product details, and more. With this, sales reps save time from having to look up names and addresses in separate files – it’s there with the click of a button. 

Why Should You Use It?

• Gives your sales team more time to focus on more complex work
• Allows you to accurately measure the value and impact of your efforts 
• Gives you data to improve customer experience
• Creates consistency

Marketing Automation spending is projected to grow tremendously in the next few years, reaching 25 billion in 2023. Spending includes a mix of different tasks, the largest expense being content marketing.  – Forrester  ‘Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, 2017 to 2023, (Global)’ (2018).

The number of businesses using marketing automation is increasing rapidly, and so is their spending. This spending replaces the countless hours of work a sales team does in the time they could be making a sale.

Optimize Your Sales Team

Sales automation is exactly what it sounds like. It takes the small, time-consuming tasks of a sales team and automates them. This makes for a more efficient work day and your sales team can focus on other, more complex work. Sales automation is used by many, and is proven to be successful. Contact DVS to learn more about how you can optimize your sales team.