How Sales Automation Can Benefit Your Business

Automation can save your company time, effort, and money. Here are five things to think about automating, plus tips for success.

Key Takeaways: 

• Automation can help a business run much more efficiently.
• The benefits of automating certain tasks include:
  • Saving time and money
  • Keeping everybody focused
  • Ensuring better accuracy
  • Retaining top employees
• Companies need to be smart about what they automate.
• Work processes to automate include:
  • Sales
  • Lead nurturing
  • Email marketing
  • Social media
  • CRM

Company leaders should always be looking for ways to improve efficiency, productivity, and profitability. And while there are a number of initiatives they can implement, there is one thing that can immediately tackle all three: automation. Once largely reserved for big corporations, businesses of all sizes can now take advantage of automating processes to improve functionality. 

Here’s what you should know about automation, including the benefits involved in undertaking it, the types of tasks and processes that should be automated, and how to get it right.

1. You’ll save time

How much time do you spend on important but tedious tasks? There are some days when this may take up the bulk of what you do, and it’s the same for your sales team. Things like data entry, call scheduling, and other administrative minutia mean that most salespeople only spend about one-third of their time at work actually selling. 

2. You’ll save money

Why did you hire your sales team? This isn’t a trick question. Those individuals are there to sell your products or services. When their attention is taken by things other than selling, you’re basically paying them for things not related to sales – which means you’re wasting multiple valuable resources. 

3. Everyone will have the right focus

When you and your team doesn’t have to worry about handling those tasks themselves, guess what happens? Everybody gets to focus on why they’re there in the first place. Salespeople can concentrate on selling, and you can think about ways to grow your business. 

4. Things will be more accurate

People are great, but there’s a big reason why the term “human error” exists. It’s very easy to wrongly enter somebody’s phone number or email address, for example, and that potential lead may be gone forever when this happens. Automation improves accuracy and removes the “human error” element.

5. You’ll keep your top performers

While some mundane tasks are part of any job, they hurt morale and motivation if employees have to spend too much time on them. It may not be long before your best people start looking for a company that offers more rewarding work – and it will probably be one that utilizes automation. 

What should you be automating?

Now that you know the benefits of automation, it’s time to think about which of your processes it might be best to automate. This list should include: 

• Sales – There is no substitute for great salespeople. Sure, solutions like chatbots have become the norm for many companies, but a human touch is still vital when it comes to actually getting people to seal the deal. The job of salespeople will be a lot easier with sales automation because it can greatly help with outreach, follow-up, prospecting, and lead scoring, among other job components.
• Lead nurturing – Turning a lead into a customer involves much more than the occasional email. These follow-ups need to be thoughtful and timely, but this doesn’t mean that salespeople have to worry about them. Automation means you can create the right messages in the right form to be delivered at the right times, on schedule, without needing to take up too much of a human staff member’s time.
• Email marketing – Speaking of emails, this is still an extremely effective tool for marketing and outreach. It takes time to craft the right content so people actually read them as well as make them personalized so they will better resonate, though. Again, automation takes this task off your plate. The templates are created once, and the program releases them as needed from there.
• Social media – Social media is another marketing tool that’s now essential. Companies have to establish a strong social presence to connect with their current and future customers, and one of the ways they can do this is with frequent updates. This doesn’t have to mean logging onto every network every day and writing posts, however. Automation means these can be written well in advance and scheduled to go out on certain days and at certain times. 
• Customer relationship management – Keeping track of prospect and customers’ names and contact information can be challenging, but a CRM simplifies the process. This data can then be automatically put into a system, eliminating the aforementioned human error. CRMs can help salespeople get to know customers and provide them with enhanced experiences, too. They can be notified when someone’s birthday is coming up so they can send a special offer, for example.

Things to keep in mind when implementing automation

Automation can be a huge boon to your organization, but you have to go in with a strategy. A structured implementation needs to include:

Checking out your competitors

It is always a smart idea to see what other companies in your industry are doing, including how they’re using automation. This can give you some great ideas about how your company can best utilize it.

Starting slowly

You may be eager to start automating tasks, but you don’t want to jump in too quickly. Begin with some of the smaller processes – or components of them – and gradually phase out the manual stuff.

Measuring the results

The main purpose of automation is to improve how your company runs, which is why your efforts need to be measured. Seeing how you’re benefiting in some areas and perhaps not others can help you make any necessary changes. 

You can further free up time and save money by working with experts in the sales team development space. Take the hiring, training, and monitoring processes off your plate by trusting them to the experts at MetaGrowth Ventures. Our company is in business to help you grow yours. Get in touch with us to learn how we can have your sales team up and running quickly.