What is Sales Automation? Definition, Benefits and a Complete Guide

Sales automation is the latest buzz for online marketers to optimize their sales cycle. Read this blog to know more about what is sales automation and its benefits.

Online business runs on the motive of enhancing and increasing their sales. All the marketing activities ultimately culminate into sales. The sales process begins with fetching leads and engaging them until they convert into customers. That means the sales process completes when a customer pays off for the product, and the sales team receives the payment. 

Like the marketing team, the sales team also needs to focus on repetitive tasks and documentation because of which they tend to focus less on the core sales activities.

Sales automation comes as a handy solution for all such core sales activities. It is a fast way to impede your sales and productivity. At the same time, you can reduce your focus on time-consuming tasks by shifting focus on other relevant sales processes to process leads.

Before going further, let us know what sales automation is.

Define Sales Automation

You can automate all your repetitive and regular tasks and activities by merely using the sales automation software. 

What does the software automate :

• Email reminders –
• Pricing
• Inventory control
• regular documentation
• Standard contracts.

What are the benefits of sales automation?

Your sales team is the pillar of your business. Strengthening your team is your top priority. You can change the course of your actions- that is how your team functions and executes the sale strategies. You can eliminate the burden of activities that are hampering your process but yet using the sales automation; you can automate these activities.

Let us see the benefits of sales automation :

1. Recognize your potential customers : 

Sales teams can use the filters criteria to dissect the potential customers and clients from the unrequired ones. It will help you achieve successful conversions when your sales team can follow-up only those customers who show interest.

2. Gain knowledge about customers :

Sales automation enables you to gather relevant statistics about the customers. The collected customer data helps you in figuring out the needs and wants of customers. Consequently, you can form your strategies defining the objectives that get you more customers.

3. Create documents and contracts: 

Sales automation helps you generate contracts and agreements. Some of the brands require authorization from customers. It means customers and vendors come together in a long-term agreement or a contract. You can automate this process and save up your time. You can generate contracts stating the terms and conditions with sales automation. Also, both parties will receive reminders when the contract is expiring.

4. Maintain relationship with customers: 

The sales process involves a lot of activities, beginning with the first interaction of your customer to the time of collecting payments. Reduce the struggle of sending manual e-mails, reminders and follow-ups to your customers. You can automate the steps of the sales cycle process. 

5. Analyze sales call: 

Analyze the sales call through transcription. The automation system automatically records the call and analyzes it with the help of conversion intelligence tools. Your sales team can jump to the next call without analyzing the previous ones.

6. Create professional proposals: 

It will enable you to get thoroughly professional with your customers. You can create sales proposals and quotations in a flicker of seconds merely by entering the details of the customers. Create proposals and send it to the customers in earnest.

7. Achieve accuracy: 

One of the prominent benefits of marketing automation is achieving accuracy. It gets harder for your sales team to deal with the pricing of numerous products. Automation thus helps in centralizing the whole system of price computation. It simplifies the process of sealing the deals with the customers through price modification.

8. Simplify the reporting process: 

Team reporting is a long process to handle. With automation, you can use CRM to report to your managers with automated emails and reports. There is no need to create manual reports which take hell a lot of hours. Automate the whole process.

What all you can automate through sales automation :

The sales process is not only restricted to generating reports and automation sales cycles. But there are other relevant processes such as providing information to the leads, allocating tasks to the teams or reporting to the managers about the teams.

• Distributing your leads:

There are no more hurdles between your leads and you. Yes, automation search engines can quickly filter your leads based on their interests, geographical factors and other criteria. It reduces the burden of the sales team in lead engagement.

• Prioritizing your leads: 

Sales automation helps you prioritize your leads based on your defined criteria – that means now you can focus on the leads who are likely to convert more. You can score the leads and determine your ideal customers based on your criteria.

•  Automate the reporting process : 

 What is all going on inside your sales process? Know all this and more. Your sales manager can now take an overview of all the internal activities of the team. Some of them are as follows – no. of calls done, any left follow-ups or the sales forecasts and predictions. All these are served well with the automated reports.

What Are The Sales Automation Best Practices :

Sales automation shortens the process of the sales cycle and helps in managing your sales effectively. But the implementation of sales automation like any other process requires you to follow some essential steps while the execution of the process:

• Evaluating current systems: Before implementing the automation process, you must look deeply into the sales process and methods you are using. It will help you analyze the time taken in all the activities and what all you need to target via automation.
  
  
• Define your objectives: Once you identify the inefficiencies in your sales process, it’s time to set your goals which you want to achieve through automation. That means you know the areas which you need to automate.
  
  
• Shortlisting automation options: Before picking up any software automation tools, you must consider and evaluate the possibilities. Because there are many other companies, who are operating in the same field as you and using the same automation tool.
  
  
• Create a separate team: To make sure, you do not go haywire with the sales automation process. All you need to do is to create a different group who can look into the loopholes during the whole implementation process.
  
  
• Run a trial: Before the implementation process, it’s essential to run a test in real-time so that you can know all the shortcomings and glitches.
  
  
• Final processing:  After all the trials and errors, it’s time to undertake and begin the automation process. The first and foremost thing is to follow a standard operating procedure. At the same time, training your sales personnel and introducing them with the same is equally important.

WHAT ASSUMPTIONS YOU MUST NOT HOLD IN SALES AUTOMATION :

• Sales automation does not mean you will not perform the usual actions. You still need to do your tasks – such as closing the sales deal or interacting with your leads. On the contrary, you can stay away from handling mundane tasks such as managing excel sheets and passing the leads to different teams.
  
  
• Sales automation will not enhance your sales number overnight. It will enable you to work more smartly and intelligently by holding your focus on essential tasks. Now you can easily focus on your leads which are likely to be converted instead of concentrating on trivial tasks.

Conclusion: 

Sales automation is the key solution to all your head straining situations in sales activities. Look at the more essential things minutely and remove the inconsistencies of the trivial matters with more power.