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Running a business can be very time-consuming, and not just for you but for your employees too. They may have an almost never-ending to-do list full of tasks to be completed by a certain deadline. This is why there’s a lot to be said for sales automation.
When certain tasks can be completed automatically, you may be able to free up time for your employees, allowing them to crack on with other things. When implemented effectively, sales automation can also allow sales to be tracked and completed more consistently, giving employees more time to focus on tasks that may otherwise be forgotten or glossed over.
So, while sales automation is great for making your sales team happier, the simple truth is that it can bring in more sales with less effort and in less time. So where should you focus your efforts?
Written by Lauren Shaw
Marketing Manager
Published: 02/05/2019
Last updated: 02/02/2021
What is sales automation?
Before we reveal our four ways to automate your sales processes, it’s first important to answer the question, what actually is sales automation?
Sales automation is the process of ensuring no leads or enquiries are missed by allowing particular tasks and analytics to be completed and reviewed using a specialist CRM tool that does the hard work on your behalf. It means that administrative and repetitive tasks no longer need to be done by members of staff, freeing up their time to work on more important things.
Not only can this increase productivity, but it also means you could improve your sales process, reduce the risk of leads vanishing, increase customer satisfaction and store more data about your sales.
Now for the crux of the matter – how exactly can you automate your sales process to achieve all of this?
How to automate your sales processes
1. Keep in touch with your leads
Many leads fail to turn into sales because communication with potential customers is lost. With automation, this could be a thing of the past. With a CRM such as FLG, a lead can automatically be thanked for their enquiry and the software does the rest.
The CRM will use data to determine the best person to deal with the enquiry, prompt them to call the customer and also remind them when a follow up is required. This means you no longer need to track leads in spreadsheets, where there is room for error, and the chances of forgetting to contact a potential customer are almost completely erased.
You no longer need to fret about ‘dead leads’ – every single lead becomes a potential successful deal.
2. Say all the right things
A big part of the sales process involves speaking to customers and persuading them to part with money in exchange for a product or service. That’s why it’s good to automate some of your sales process where you can, but you’ll want to be careful that you’re still seen as personal and trustworthy rather than robotic.
Your users will also need to know when to step in and contact a potential customer directly. An automated CRM can, for example, alert users when a lead completes an action that indicates they’re ready to make a purchase, so they can jump in at just the right time.
Similarly, if you set up your CRM to remind your users to make initial contact with a lead or to conduct a follow-up call, saying the right things is very important. You can easily set up a step-by-step guided sales script or a qualifying process that tells your sales people what to say and how to respond in certain scenarios. The lead’s answers can be recorded (with permission, of course) and action can be taken accordingly.
3. Tailor your sales calls
Are your employees spending lots of time making sales calls to new leads? Manual dialling can be inefficient, and it takes time to find the right leads to call. Then there’s the time taken to sell them them your product or service. All of this, along with running into dead numbers and busy lines etc., can become very time consuming.
Instead, you could use dialler to automatically call leads on your users’ behalf. If there’s no answer it’ll move on to the next number until it connects your user with a lead, cutting out the time it takes to physically input telephone numbers and increasing the time spent talking to potential customers.
While many businesses are reluctant to use diallers of fear of killing the spirit of their sales team, this can be avoided by using the system for ‘power hour dialling’ – just one hour of intense calling each day, freeing up the rest of the day for your users to focus on progressing existing sales opportunities.
A CRM can help you get set up for sales lead automation, along with an integrated pay-as-you-go dialler that works with your existing phones. Because there’s no up-front investment, there’s no risk in trying this technique.
4. Send quotes automatically
It’s likely that a potential customer will want a quote before they agree to a service. You certainly wouldn’t buy home insurance, for instance, without first finding out how much it costs. Rather than wasting time creating a bespoke Word or PDF document for each quote you have to send, you could automate this process. By using a CRM system such as FLG, you can use a template to generate and send a quote with just a few clicks of a button.
By automating this process, you’re reducing the chance of an error, such as a document that hasn’t attached, an incorrectly typed email address or an email that won’t send, meaning 100 per cent of your quotes will reach the intended recipient.
If you’ve considered automating your sales process, but haven’t quite taken that leap yet, we at FLG hope that we’ve convinced you to look into it further.