When you think of activities that are most important for making a sale, you must be probably thinking about several actions that need the human touch of the sales reps in your organization. Like listening to the needs of your leads and prospects, developing a solution to their pain points, and thereafter ask for the sale.
In 2018, 87% of the businesses are estimated to use cloud-based CRM, while a mere 13% are pegged to use on-premise CRM. Click To TweetHowever, apart from selling there are also several other tasks that your sales reps need to perform on a regular basis, as according to a recent survey done by InsideSales stated:
“Sales reps only spend 35.2% of their time actually selling, with the majority of their day spent on administrative tasks, research, and other non-selling obligations.”
These non-selling obligations can be things like:
For the managers in your sales teams, the most widespread non-selling activity may include assigning leads to their sales reps or training new salespersons on the team’s sales processes.
Sales automation refers to any software tool that facilitates or automates manual tasks for your sales teams.
Therefore, the most popular purpose of using sales automation in your best small business CRM software is to eliminate tasks that do not involve direct interaction or relationship building activities with your customers and reduce the amount of effort a sales team spends on managing and organizing their sales processes.
However, in spite of what the word “sales automation” may imply, it cannot replace the basic task that a sales rep do- Selling.
In fact, sales automation is a process that makes the actual work of a sales rep more valuable, as it permits them to invest more attention and time on quality sales-related actions, like improving the sales process, qualifying leads, or give the best prospects more attention to hasten the sale.
Types of Sales Automation
Sales Automation is a general terminology that can take many different forms.
Many organizations use silo sales automation platforms that focus on one specific part of the sales process (like prospecting or sending cold emails), while other those who rely on their best CRM for small business like ConvergeHub, can automate numerous activities throughout the sales process with salesforce automation integrated into the CRM.
Here are some of the key areas that sales automation can help to undo some of the frustrating and busywork out of a sale rep’s daily work, using salesforce automation (SFA) friendly CRM like ConvergeHub, which caters to almost all of these helpful tools.
Sales automation in best small business CRM software can instantaneously generate easy to use CRM records when a business card is scanned, a web-form is filled out by a visitor, whereby it saves the reps from having to create new lead records and fresh contacts manually.
One of the most annoying and frustrating “non-selling tasks” for any sales rep is the need to log in phone calls, emails, and several other customer communications for the benefit of the managers and other employees in the organization. Sales automation software is capable of logging those activities into your easy to use CRM software as soon as they happen, without the sales rep having to do the task times and again manually.
A sales automation software integrated into an easy to use CRM that has the ability to scour the Web for information can aid the sales team in several ways, from gathering publicly available data on the prospects and adding them to the CRM database to searching social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn to identify potential customers.
Per say, users of ConvergeHub CRM for small business can also avail its FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL for visiting anyone’s social media page and capture all information instantly with no manual typing.
Sales automation software platforms are also capable of doing many more things that involve typing. For example, if you need to create a proposal for your prospects, sales automation can auto-fill your leads’ and prospect’s details like name, address, pricing, and particulars of your offerings. Additionally, an automated dialer like Click-to-Call when integrated with an easy to use CRM software solution reduces the need for the salespeople to punch in phone numbers manually for outbound calls.
Although no sales automation software even when integrated with an online lead management software like an easy to use CRM solution can put one-on-one communication on autopilot, nevertheless, many of the grunt-jobs involved in connecting with the prospects, delivering customized contents, or following up with the prospects at the right time, can be automated.
Sales email campaigns for prospecting targeted leads, scheduling meetings, and sending automated voicemails that permit sales reps to drop pre-recorded messages to the prospect’s mailbox when they do not answer their phones, can be easily automated using salesforce automation in a CRM.
One of primary thing that a sales manager needs to do when a lead comes into the sales pipeline is to assign the lead to the most capable rep that is most likely to close the deal, which is based on factors like demographic preferences, or how comfortable the sales rep is with the specific product line.
Sales automation software in easy to use CRM software, allows managers to automatically distribute leads to the reps by setting automatic lead assignment rules based on their preferred criteria.
Apart from this after a lead is assigned to a sales rep, sales automation can eliminate the need for the rep to manually advance the lead through the sales funnel in the CRM, when stage goals are accomplished, or update the lead score when a lead progresses from one stage to another and ends up (hopefully) into a sale.
With automated reminders implemented in an easy to use best small business CRM software, sale reps always know what they need to do next, which ensures that important meetings, and follow-ups with the prospects and leads, are completed on time.
How sales automation separate the amateurs from the pros?
Concisely, the basic and the most fundamental difference between the amateur and the pro sales reps lie in consistency.
Therefore sale automation software when integrated with best small business CRM software creates this consistency that is needed for a team to accurately measure the health of their sales funnel and impact of their sales and marketing efforts, which ultimately helps the team to make improvements in their sales strategies accordingly.
