6 Ways To Automate Sales And Boost Your Team’s Performance

Do you spend days manually following up leads or adding them to your CRM?

Have you ever wasted hours digging through your emails to find high-potential leads?

Do you go back and forth with a prospect to schedule a good time to meet?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, it’s time you automate your sales.

According to McKinsey, 30% of sales activities can be easily automated. They also share a case study of a company that used automation to streamline its bidding process and successfully increased its revenue by 5%, decreased order processing time from 2 days to 2 hours, and achieved higher customer satisfaction.

If you want to see similar results for your company, stay with us to learn more about automating your sales and the different tools you can use to kickstart your journey today!

What Is Sales Automation?

Sales automation is the process of automating manual, time-consuming sales activities with the help of digital tools, software, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It eliminates mundane and repetitive sales tasks, enabling you and your sales team to focus on closing more deals.

Sales automation allows you to:

• Automate prospecting and follow-ups
• Run a personalized email campaign 
• Schedule appointments on a mutually agreed time
• Send invoices and payment reminders to get paid without asking repeatedly.

It’s safe to say that automating your sales process empowers you to win more time back so you can reinvest it to boost your business by closing more deals.

Now let’s have a look at how to automate your sales.

6 Ways To Automate Your Sales

Sales automation is all about putting repetitive tasks on autopilot. Things like outreaching at the right time, email marketing, expense reporting, appointment scheduling, etc., don’t need a sales rep to babysit the task correctly. Sales automation uses data, algorithms, and tools to automatically carry out such tasks more efficiently, freeing your time for other creative activities.

Here are six ways you can automate repetitive sales tasks: 

1. Automate Prospecting

Not all potential prospects are ready to purchase, either because they want to buy later and are waiting for the right time or they’re hunting for cheaper alternatives.

Over 70% of prospects leave the website without purchasing because of the following reasons:

• High shipping costs
• Not ready to purchase
• High product price
• Want to save products for later consideration

To make your prospecting efforts count, you need high-quality leads free of all the potential why-not-to-buy elements.

That’s where automation in sales prospecting comes into the picture. It helps you find more leads in less time and ensures those leads are of high quality through a tool where you enter your target audience’s details, and it comes up with a list of leads, along with all their valid contact information.

Let’s say you’re prospecting on LinkedIn. You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a social selling platform by LinkedIn, to enter your prospects’ criteria like “Marketing and Advertising, France” in search filters, and you’ll get a prequalified list of potential customers.

Once you find a list of leads, you need to send connection requests. With a LinkedIn automation tool like Expandi, you can auto-send connection requests and follow-ups that go beyond surface-level personalization (i.e., first name, last name, job role, etc.). The tool allows you to use personalized images in your LinkedIn messages to help you stand out from the crowd and get your request accepted.

2. Build An Email List

With 4 billion daily email users and 74% of marketers believing the email is the most personal channel to communicate with brands—it’s evident how powerful it is to build an email list today.

Founder of Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi, says, “Getting an email address is the first critical step to figuring out who my reader is, and hopefully in the future, my customer of some sort.”

People subscribe to your email list only when they engage with your content and want more value from you. By building an email list, you’re creating a group of subscribers who want to hear from your brand, consume your content, receive your product offers, and someday convert into paying customers.

But how exactly can you build an email list from scratch? Enter email signup forms.

To build an email list, you’ll need a signup form on your website. Your signup form should compel visitors to give in their email addresses with a promise of sending valuable emails that educate them, help them solve problems, or offer incentives. GetApp’s research shows that 22% of subscribers sign up to receive deals or special offers, 21.4% want news updates, and 21% are interested in articles or content. Offering a free trial is also an effective way to get people to sign up.

Daily Steals, a site to get daily deals on popular products, offered 10% off to visitors who signed up to their website. This campaign resulted in a 28% boost in lead capture.

3. Run A Personalized Email Campaign

Imagine you run a fitness blog. You want to send a welcome email each time someone signs up for your newsletter. This email will welcome new users and give them some fitness tips to get started. It would take time to manually create and send emails to every person when they sign up. And this is just one email. Considering it takes 6-8 marketing touches to convert prospects into buyers, you have to send multiple emails in a row.

Automated email campaigns let you create email series tailored to your prospects’ needs and auto-send them at a specific time. For instance, you can automate sending a “Thank you” email with a receipt when someone purchases on your site.

So instead of spending time writing and sending individual emails, you can focus more on creating an inspiring email for your audience and keep building your email list further.

To get started, you need an email automation tool as per your email marketing goals, subscriber count, and strategy requirements.

Fashion House Kate Spade sends an automated welcome email to its new subscribers. Their email thanks users for subscribing, offers 15% off to their next purchase and includes a prominent call to action.

You can also send automated email sequences for people engaging with your previous emails, such as opening it or clicking a specific link.

For instance, I clicked on an email link to Headline Master Class by Jon Morrow, a renowned writer. So they sent me a follow-up email, nudging me to sign up for the program:

Great, right?

But what about personalization? After all, personalized emails have 6X higher transaction rates.

The good news is email automation tools allow you to segment your subscribers based on their behaviours and interests. For instance, if someone signs for your newsletter from a page titled “growth hacking,” they receive handy tips on how to help businesses acquire and retain customers. And if someone signs up through a page titled “Content ideas for niche blogging,” they will be added to a different segment and receive new content ideas each day.

Next, email automation tools also come with personalized templates. These templates automatically add first name, company name, and other details to make your message sound more human.

4. Schedule Appointments

Once you start building relationships with subscribers and prospects, it’s time to take a thorough look at their unique challenges and effectively present your products or services as a solution. You can do this with one-on-one meetings with each of your prospects.

However, the process of scheduling a meeting with potential customers takes an eternity: you send your date and time, they return with a different date and time, again you send another date, and it goes on forever. This back-and-forth is not only time-consuming but also kills your deal’s momentum and extends the buying process

Instead, you can use an online appointment and meeting scheduling tool like Bookafy to let customers book an appointment as per your calendar availability. For instance, you can select a list of available dates and times, send the prospect a link to your calendar, and let them choose any open time that works for them.

Once your customers confirm the date and time, the online scheduler auto-generates Zoom links for online meetings. It also sends appointment reminders to you and your customers through email or SMS text, so you don’t miss it.

5. Create Persuasive Business Presentation Templates

The average human attention span is only 8 seconds. Now, apply this to your upcoming online meeting with your client. You talk to them, but how do you know they’re paying attention? Your client can be anywhere from a noisy cafe in New York to a comfortable living room at home with children passing by. How will you keep them engaged with your ideas and ensure they focus on what you’re saying and convert on the call itself?

Here, persuasive business presentation templates can help you create visual experiences and share valuable online information.

Business presentation template consists of images, colours, fonts, layouts, background styles, and even content so you can transform your presentation into a multimedia experience. All you need to do is replace their images and content with yours. Think about it. What’s better: talking about your business or supporting your words with pictures, customer testimonials, and charts, showing the value of your products or services?

6. Automate Invoicing

It takes days to create an invoice manually, send it to your customers, wait for the payment, sends out payment reminders, collects payments and enter the details in your accounting software. Instead, an automated invoice tool takes care of the entire process from the moment you create an invoice to when you receive the payment.

According to statistics, an automated invoice solution can:

• Reduce the time spent behind administrative tasks by 10-20 hours per week
• Help you get paid 15 days faster and reduce overdue balances
• Decreases human error by removing duplicate entries

Wrapping Up

Sales automation is a win-win for everyone. Companies benefit from higher sales productivity, and sales reps enjoy greater job satisfaction by doing what they are meant to do: selling and delivering value to customers. And customers receive a faster turnaround.

Automate your sales, save time, get better results, use the tools, and let the results speak for themselves.