Sales automation is a game-changer for sales and marketing teams around the globe. The time-saving tool can help increase productivity and, ultimately, increase sales.  Sales automation can include everything from automating repetitive, mundane tasks to taking over your chat conversations on your website.  It will keep the sales process going when you forget a step or can’t manage to do it yourself.  Automating your sales tasks and processes can mean the difference between staying stagnant with your sales, and taking it to the next level.

How sales automation can take your sales to the next level:

AI-based bots

With artificial intelligence (AI), your sales can increase, while barely needing to lift a finger.  Chatbots, for instance, can answer customer questions, fix problems, personalize interactions and improve the overall customer experience.  Bots can also help with lead generation and lead qualification with automatic scoring.

Creating emails

Automation tools can now create emails that are each just as unique as if a person wrote them, with different templates, fonts, colors, etc.  Any kind of repetitive emails can be sent automatically, such as subscription confirmations, welcome emails, seasonal greetings and check-ins.

Automated emails can be sent at specific intervals to specific leads, personalized according to what they were looking at on your website and their demographics, if applicable.   Hubspot’s blog titled “How to Automate email Prospecting without Losing Your Soul” also suggests creating reusable sequences for different personas in order to maximize efficiency.  Creating different email sequences per persona will help you with your automation.

Build lists

Building and segmenting your customer email lists automatically is another way to bring your sales to the next level.  You will be able to classify your contacts based on what they do with the emails they receive from you, the behaviors they exhibit while on your website and the actions that they take.

Building lists by having subscriptions and ways for visitors to opt-in for emails will help you avoid being seen as spam and help you avoid sending unsolicited communications.

Increase awareness

The sales funnel explains the process to move prospective customers into buyers.  At the top of that funnel is where you make your prospects aware of your business, product and/or service through branding, content marketing, etc.  Saturating this part of the funnel helps move prospects to the next stage of the funnel: Interest.  Automation will help you track which prospect is in what part of the sales funnel so you can better prepare them for the next stage and keep moving them down until they take “action” and purchase from you.

Organize sales teams

Sales automation will ultimately organize your sales teams, sending only relevant and qualified leads their way and giving them more time to work on other aspects of the sales process.  Your sales teams’ approach to sales will be much more efficient.  They will not be required to mark their calendars or set manual reminders that “potential customer A” wants to talk about your product 3 months from now.  They’ll be able to set up the automated email immediately and schedule it to be sent in 3 months.

How a CRM can help

An enhanced customer relationship management (CRM) software is going to be your key to sales automation success.  Agile CRM offers sales automation software that can create new tasks automatically for your team and automate your calendar, follow-up emails and phone calls.

Agile CRM’s marketing automation also allows you to build marketing campaigns extremely easily, plus create web popups, email newsletters, autoresponders and personalized campaigns for email and social media.  With the ability to score leads and segment contacts automatically based on actions by the user, you’ll have many advantages the competition simply doesn’t have.

In summary

There are many processes that need to be followed in order to make a sale.  It’s been refined and used again and again since the dawn of sales.  However, much of this process can now be completed for your sales team automatically, allowing them more time to do more important tasks.  Automating sales isn’t going to replace sales representatives.  Rather, it makes their jobs much easier and helps them be more productive.

Sales automation is extremely effective in helping you determine where bottlenecks are in your sales process and determine where your best leads are coming from.  It can also help you with your sales forecasting by generating robust reports that show your sales pipeline.

From automatically uploading your contact’s information into your CRM to sending strategically timed email follow-ups and, ultimately, getting the sale, sales automation can be a game-changer for your organization as well.  If you would like to see how Agile CRM can substantially improve your sales, give it a try for free for 30 days.