Tools to rule Sales Automation

Sales automation is a technique of using software to automate business tasks for sales. These tasks include order processing, information sharing, contact management, inventory monitoring and control, order tracking, sales forecast analysis and employee performance evaluation. Sales automation is often referred to as customer relationship management (CRM) however it does not necessarily imply automation of sales tasks.

The question, which will now arise in your mind is, why do we need sales automation?

For the companies and organizations, the need to sell something is the most prevalent, sales automation tools have become nearly as indispensable as phones and calendars. Based on the experience, business would find it painfully difficult to keep competition at bay. If we will simply leave sales force on its own it will eventually become unwieldy and bloated. Especially in the case when everyone on the team reverts to perform tedious tasks manually. Thus it is clear that to thrive in the new economy you need to adopt new technologies that enable sales and optimize your existing talents, tools and teamwork.

Pros and Cons

Among other things, sales automation gives you deep insight about prospects and managers to create strategic visualizations to which will improve the performance of the sales team as a whole. Many organizations and companies are now readily adopting different automation software to enhance the overall customer experience and journey with the company.

In the process of automation, you have to take care that not everything in the world of selling should be automated. After all, customers are people and they expect to be treated like humans – by humans, if they feel uncomfortable about them being tracked like a mere static by a computer program, the customer might lose interest in dealing with you. To win their loyalty, sellers must provide excellent customer services and experience to trigger the right customer responses, sophisticated Chatbots can help marketers to engage retail customer but buyers still demand relationship with expert human consultants.

Unless the sales representatives know her way around the tools she uses, it is very likely that she bungle and turn the prospects. If the automated email campaign is not designed and planned properly it can easily surpass the peskiness of spam. So you must keep in mind one thing, the technology is only as good as the human using it. Once you allow your brand name to be tagged with the reputation of a spammer, you will bring your business close to irrelevance.

Here is a list of sales automation tools that will help you to take your business to a different level:

Email Templates

Many emails like meeting confirmation and follow up emails do not very much. You can personalize 40 to 50% of the content to increase the response rate. By creating mail templates you can skip the old practice of copying and pasting and the time-consuming work of typing out the same basic sentences over and over.

These templates can be easily and quickly customized for the specific recipient and situation before sending them off. Some software even lets you add personalization tokens to automatically fill details like company and job title.

Meeting Schedulers

The process of scheduling a meeting with a prospect may feel like a tennis rally. Just send one date and time over the internet, they reply with different date and time, you send another. This inefficient back and forth is sufficient to kill the momentum of your deal. By using an appointment and momentum scheduling tool you can speed up the process between showing the demo and getting a slot on the calendar. You just have to simply shoot the prospect a link to your schedule and let them choose any open time that works for them.

Sales calls analysis

Self-reflection is an important part of leveling up, but honestly, if you are given a choice between listening to and reviewing your last call and getting on another one, you will always choose the latter. Here the new conversation tool comes into play, it gives you quick summaries of all your calls – both transcribed and analyzed. Some software pulls out key pieces of your conversation such as a topic covered, and action is taken. It even gives you AI-powered insights about the opportunity.

Proposals

There is no need to draft a proposal or quote by copying and pasting the relevant details from your emails, notes and CRM tool. Some tools integrate with your CRM so that key details like customer information, price and product details are automatically transferred when you create a quote. You can also set up timed reminders for your tools to sign prospects. If you want to make sure that your manager or legal department review the contract first, you can set-up an automated workflow on the internal level.

Process builders

Process builders facilitate the lives of admins, it is like a workflow rule of multi-decision on steroids. It is very easy to build automation tool with great functionality and it helps in increasing the declarative work done by the admin by a huge margin. This tool has certain key features as it will automatically create a record, update field, log a call and submit approval. Process builder can help you with almost everything, you can have multiple decision points. This tool is so easy to use that any admin can use it without any problem. 

Everything comes with its own disadvantages and if you want to use process builder for large-scale work, it will quickly show you its limits. So if you are planning to use this automation tool with simultaneously loading thousands of records, you will be unsatisfied with its performance. If it is not set-up and designed correctly the users can easily run into issues of breaking the tool.

Customer Intelligence tools

In the process of finding the right customer, you want to look for a few defining factors immediately right off the bat. You are in search of companies that can afford your products, companies that have a similar base as of your current client and companies that are currently using similar products. It will be easy for you to start in this fashion. After you dive in, you have to make a choice on the basis of specific corporate role and position of the person you would like to start the conversation with. A customer intelligence tool can help you in the first part of the process.

Sales forecasting

If you want to formulate your strategy and fine-tune your tactics you must have a general idea of your revenue trend. Your ability to forecast the performance of your sales enables you to reallocate scarce resources to where they have the highest demands. This is where sales forecasting tools give you a great advantage. They help you by providing slight ideas of how will the sales go so that you can make you strategies for the same.

e-Signatures

After completing the tough task of finding prospects, having positive conversations and searching meaningful customer experience. Your prospect has finally given the nod.

You still have to take care of all the legal bindings, agreements, personalization of service terms and getting the customer to sign up for the service

Need help with automating your sales processes? Get in touch