Sales Automation – It`s More Than Just Sales

In the business world, nothing is more precious than time. But, how often do you take measures that actually save you a plenty of time? If your whole sales process continues to operate in conventional ways, it means your sales team takes notes of everything worth noting down; schedules call to potential customers and arrange leads based on their priority. Any guesses, how much time your sales team goes into such processes? It is more than half. Don’t this sound alarming? Yes, it does. No business owner would let such a huge amount of time to go waste, nor should you. So what`s the solution?

Sales Automation is the best solution to put a brake on the time wastage. What it does is automates the tasks that sales teams do repeatedly – every day, every week and every month. Automation saves your company time, brings accuracy to tasks filled with errors and makes sales process speedy. Business owners now-a-days are implementing CRM tools like Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM to automate their sales process.

When I say sales automation automates every task sales team does, many businessmen may misunderstand the statement. They tend to make it mean something that completely replaces sales team, and that`s not true. In fact, sales team retains its relevancy, its position, its task even after deploying sales automation. It improves the sales process, renders complex processes, makes sales team efficient, removes errors and saves time. When automation takes care of recurrent tasks such as receiving and scheduling orders, making available information on shipping, updating customer information, it gives your sales team freedom to do other things that automation cannot do. Researching, cementing relationships with customers and figuring out ways to make automation more accessible to get the right proportion of technology and human workforce that makes your sales team look more professional.

These days every business sort of invests huge amounts in automation technology to boost sales. The estimated expenditure on sales automation was $3 billion way back in 2004, according to IDC report.

Tasks to Automate with Sales Automation

It`s time to discuss why sales automation is not just about sales only. In fact, multitudes of processes are there that you can automate with the help of sales automation to increase the productivity of your sales process.

• Drafting an Email – One thing you see sales people constantly doing is sending emails and that consumes plenty of time. With sales automation, email drafting process gets a lot easier and speedy because of well-personalized email templates.

• Calling a Lead – Dialing manually all your leads can be a tiresome thing to do. But by integrating CRM tools with your business, you can not only make the tasks simpler but also get to dial more leads than usual, which is not possible manually.

• Prioritizing a Lead – It should be a daunting task to figure out who to call first, isn`t it? The same thing can be done quite easily by using right technology. Automation technology sorts and prioritizes leads based on their lead scores.

• Taking a Note – When a call is established, next important thing to do is taking a note of, or writing down, what you deduced the positive points out of a call. Technology such as Salesforce CRM can automate the note-taking process by taking down call results automatically. It helps sales person keep track of his own performance and create a separate list of potential leads.

• Scheduling an Appointment – Scheduling appointment is an important sales process that needs to be automated. You can create a schedule with the help of Salesforce Inbox, where you point out all your available times and potential customer can choose appointment time by clicking on the time he is available. With just a click, you get to schedule an appointment right away.

• Specific Lead to Specific Person – It is the best feature you get with sales automation. Now your representatives will no longer have to transfer calls because with this advanced feature a call will be automatically transferred to the right department and right person based on their availability and skill, no more mixing up.

These are not the only tasks, but they are sufficient to give you the glimpse of how sales automation works and what changes it can bring to your work culture. They give you an idea how to save you time, energy and money.

With that said, you should not miss its other aspects which is equally important to be considered here. You should not get blindly obsessed with automation technology and totally ignore the human trying to establish human connection. This could destroy your aspect of building customer relationships. You have to make technology and human contact go side by side. After all, what automation can`t do, humans can. In business, customer relations are what matters the most!