7 best sales automation strategies for businesses

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Modern sales teams within businesses are responsible for the majority of new revenue that’s generated for a business.

Although sales teams have a great impact on the success of a business, most salespeople are still performing well below their capacity due to manual processes.

This has led to businesses adopting sales automation strategies to help improve the productivity of sales teams.

Even though most businesses understand the importance of sales automation, they are not sure which is best and applicable for them.

In this post, we’ll cover the 7 best sales automation strategies that you can start using today to propel your sales team to the next level.

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The Best Sales Automation strategies:

1. Use chatbots

One of the most immediate ways that a sales team can add sales automation to their workflow is using chatbots. Chatbots are computer programs that can simulate human conversation.

They are commonly used in sales, ecommerce and customer service contexts to help automate repetitive tasks.

For sales teams, chatbots can be used to book sales appointments, follow up with leads, and provide sales intelligence. This is often the area where sales teams spend most of their time doing admin work.

With the use of a chatbot, you can automate the entire booking and follow-up process and your sales teams can spend more time selling to clients.

There are sales-specific chatbots that your team can use to specifically power your sales operations. Sales-focused chatbots have additional features like sales intelligence and the ability to connect with your sales CRM.

You can easily integrate your sales tools and enable your chatbot to automate even more of your sales operations. This is a great first step business can take to add sales automation to their workflow.

2. Couple sales with email marketing

In addition to chatbots, email marketing is a great channel to leverage to automate sales. Email marketing can be used at different stages of the sales process to help automate repetitive tasks.

For example, sales teams can use email marketing to send automated follow-ups to leads and customers. Email marketing can also be used to send sales information, coupons, or other sales material to prospects and customers.

What makes email marketing different from other sales channels is that your business owns the list.

The prospects on your list willingly signed up to be included in your email marketing, so they are often much easier to sell to than cold contacts.

By using the best email marketing strategy, your sales team can focus on selling rather than prospecting. Additionally, you have the contact information of your prospects and you can reach out directly and sell to them.

3. Leverage SEO

SEO offers sales teams an evergreen way to generate leads and customers for businesses. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can attract visitors who are actively searching for products and services that your business offers.

This is different from other marketing channels where you have to go out and find your audience. With SEO, your audience comes to you; this also means that leads and sales come to you.

Customers who found your business through SEO are much more qualified and much likelier to be sold to than cold contacts.

Your sales team can start using SEO by targeting queries that their customers are searching for. For instance, if you sell software products, your sales team can target queries like “best software for small businesses” or “top CRM for sales teams”.

Once you have a solid SEO strategy in place, you can convert your organic traffic into leads and generate sales for your business. This is one of the best long-term strategies to automate your lead generation process.

4. Improve or adopt a CRM

The single most powerful tools that a sales team can leverage are their CRM products. A CRM influences every aspect of the sales process and can have a profound impact on sales productivity.

It’s a singular tool that automates, analyzes and can give recommendations on virtually every aspect of the sales cycle. If your sales team isn’t currently using one, you can significantly increase your productivity by choosing one.

If you are currently using one, you can further increase your output by exploring better CRMs for your given market.

A CRM can tangibly help your sales team automate processes like sales tasks, sales forecasting and sales pipeline management.

Additionally, it can help with other sales processes like sales culture and sales intelligence. By having all of these sales processes working in tandem, you can create a sales machine that is much more efficient and effective than your current one.

This ultimately helps your sales team spend less time on manual tasks and more time with clients and closing sales.

5. Streamline scheduling

Scheduling is often a manual and repetitive task for sales teams; it can take multiple emails, calls and follow-ups to get a prospect to schedule properly with your team.

This is particularly true if your sales team is managing a high volume of sales leads. To streamline scheduling, you will need to use a scheduling tool of some kind.

Many CRMs offer scheduling features in their programs; if you don’t use a CRM, you can use a tool like Calendly and this can help you set up meetings and facilitate your scheduling process.

By automating your scheduling process, you can take a lot of the manual work out of it. This way, your sales team can focus on their sales process and not on the back-and-forth of scheduling.

This is one of the easiest processes to automate in your sales operations because it’s very inexpensive. Many scheduling tools are free and some offer paid plans for additional features.

You can select, integrate and deploy a scheduling automation tool in less than a day for your sales team.

6. Auto-generate and qualify leads

One of the most time-consuming tasks that salespeople do is generating leads and qualifying leads. Depending on the different software and platforms used, this can take days if not weeks to do.

Automating just this part of the sales process can save sales teams dozens of hours per week. You can start auto-generating and qualifying leads by analyzing your current processes. If your team is using a manual and repetitive process to do this, there’s likely a software or service that can automate this for you.

Most sales teams can do this by using lead generation software and business intelligence tools. Lead generation software allows businesses to automatically generate leads through the use of web forms, live chat, and email capture.

The software will then qualify these leads by assigning a score to each one. The sales team can then prioritize the sales pipeline by working on the leads with the highest score first.

By automating the lead generation and qualification process, sales teams can focus on selling instead of generating and qualifying leads.

7. Automating customer feedback

Another manual process that eats up the time of sales teams is getting customer feedback. This process is often manual because sales teams need to reach out to customers individually to get their feedback.

This can take a lot of time, and it’s often difficult to get customers to respond. To automate this process, you can use customer feedback tools. These tools help you collect feedback automatically from customers after your sales team interacts with them.

Customer feedback tools can facilitate customers to give you feedback via email, live chat, or web forms.

If you have an in-house IT support team or development team, they can help incorporate these into your sales processes. The feedback is then collected and organized so you can see it in one place.

This helps sales teams get the insights they need to improve their sales process and close more sales. The insights can give your team both quantitative and qualitative data on how they can improve their processes.

Customer feedback tools can also be incorporated easily in your CRM. This way, you can see customer feedback alongside your sales data and gain a holistic view of your sales operations.

There are many customer feedback tools out there that your sales team can start using. Some of the popular tools include Uservoice, SurveyMonkey, Typeform and Hubspot.

The sales automation strategies discussed above are just some of the ways you can streamline your sales operations.

By automating manual processes, sales teams can focus on their sales process and close more sales. In addition, automating processes can help sales teams save time and be more efficient.

When selecting the right sales automation strategy for your business, it’s important to consider the needs of your sales team.

Each sales team is different, and what works for one team may not work for another. It’s also important to consider the sales process and the different steps involved.

By understanding your sales process, you can find the best sales automation strategy for your business. To learn more about how you can benefit from sales automation, explore our blog post on why you should invest in sales automation.

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