5 sales automations your business needs

The Bridge Group states that sales productivity is the first challenge for approximately 65 percent of B2B companies. To maximize revenue, every business needs a sales team that dedicates more than 70 percent of their time making sales calls and closing deals. However, most of the reps spend 60 percent of their time on menial activities like sending emails, finding leads, filling data and creating to-dos and follow-up sheets.

This hampers their ability to concentrate on the main agenda: contacting more leads to increase customer conversions.

Another study shows that 79 percent of businesses want to focus on improving the productivity of existing reps. The simplest way to do this is to invest in a CRM that offers powerful sales automation, which increases reps’ productivity by taking care of menial tasks. A study by Nucleus Research shows that a CRM integrated with sales automation features can increase the sales reps productivity by 26.4 percent.

What type of sales automation features should your CRM provide to ensure that your sales reps productivity goes up?

1. Lead Generation Automation

Your CRM should make it easy for you to identify leads that are coming to your website. It should offer landing page-ready web forms such as pop-ups and survey sheets where leads can fill in their information. It should also automatically add these leads and their information to your database and alert you.

Another way your CRM can ease this process is through automatic contact clipping from various social media sites. With Agile CRM, users can clip any lead information directly from Twitter and LinkedIn using Chrome Prospector, a simple Chrome extension.

2. Email Automation

The ability to automate and schedule emails to all of your leads is a must. Having customized and personalized campaigns also benefits your sales reps. They don’t have to manually insert email IDs and send emails to individual leads. There are four levels to look for: triggered emails, lead nurturing emails (nurture campaigns), individual emails and emails blasts.

Retention Science found that personalized emails with a recipient’s name in the subject line and body have higher open rates. Agile CRM gives you the option to send out personalized emails to every lead without making it look like a bulk blast. In addition, you can send triggered emails based on different SLAs and you can personalize the email IDs, name and company address as well as scheduling group emails across multiple time zones.

3. Follow-up Task Automation

Manually following up on various tasks and action items is time-consuming. Your CRM should be armed with the ability to automate follow-up tasks by adding both tasks and action items directly into your emails and calls. An initial email to your lead should have follow-up tasks like replying to the lead in two days, calling the lead in next three days, following the lead on social media channels, and so on, baked in.

It should also allow you to add tasks for others such as your marketing team. If your lead information is incorrect, add a task for marketing team to input the right data. Or, if need be, add a task when identifying hot and cold leads.

4. Call Automation

Almost 92 percent of customer interaction happens on the phone. As such, sales reps require an automation tool that allows them to operate without distraction. Your CRM should let them add automated call campaigns wherein they can keep calling priority leads and move to other leads seamlessly, without leaving the telephony dashboard or typing the number again.

Your CRM should also automate dialing, leave automated voicemails, add notes and tasks while on the call, schedule emails, and provide contact data while on the call.

5. Lead Scoring Automation

Allotting an accurate score to every lead is crucial—it sets the benchmark for hot, warm and cold leads. Your CRM should be automation-friendly in this regard, adding and deducting points from the lead score based on their behavior. If the lead fills out a form on your webpage, add a lead score. If a lead clicks a link, add a score. If a lead downloads any content, add a score, etc.

Sales automation is a very important aspect of any CRM, and by using these sales automations, the productivity of your sales reps should see a nice improvement.