Your sales process provides you with a strategy for turning prospects into paying customers. You can keep prospects organized, ensuring you’re reaching out at the correct moment, and establish solid customer connections that will last for years with the right system in place.
Sales automation frees up time for you to focus on what you do best which is, of course, selling. You may want to consider automating your sales process in a variety of ways. Here are our top ways that you can automate your sales process to get you started off.
Sales emails
For almost any salesperson, email is the preferred method of contact. Unfortunately, getting a strong email sales campaign up and going becomes tough when you’re attempting to handle hundreds of interactions.
When you’re manually tracking when to send a follow-up or check in with a lead, it’s difficult to keep organized––and there’s little tolerance for error. It’s possible that you’ll lose a transaction if you unintentionally contact the incorrect person, send the wrong message, or fail to follow up at all.
You can automate follow-up communications and initial outreaches utilizing automation like with a CRM, for example. It also lets you specify particular rules for the sequence, such as when it should finish, modify, or continue according to how the lead responds to your messages.
Related: Ways Your Emails Can Stand Out From Other Emails Prospects Get
Building a lead list
It all boils down to having a good lead list when it comes to closing transactions efficiently. Unfortunately, scanning the internet for people or corporations that could be interested in your offer takes a long time.
Your sales team will have a high-quality, specified list of people to reach out to if you automate your lead list generation process.
You just enter parameters such as job title, industry, and location into an automatic lead list creating tool, and you’ll be provided with people that fit those specifications. You can use tools like the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to pull data from databases and social media platforms.
Related: More Than a Leads List: How Data Impacts ABM, According to Research
Lead Prioritization
Multiple sources may provide your company with a large number of leads. Some of these leads may be searching for a temporary connection, while others may be interested in beginning a business partnership with you. While it’s obvious that spending a lot of time with the former group of leads is a waste of time, your sales staff may not realize it. Of course, AI-based lead scoring solutions exist to assist your sales people in prioritizing leads.
Consider the metrics that are specific to your business type before beginning to build your lead scoring model. Most companies evaluate leads based on clear indicators such as job title, industry, and firm size. In certain situations, companies want more information about how a client utilizes a product and can make decisions based on implicit signals such as website activity, page visits, and collateral downloads.
Related: Lead Scoring: The 5 Attributes To Consider When Ranking Your Leads
Don’t shy away from scheduling meetings
Trying to organize a meeting is one of the most time-consuming activities. You offer a time, the prospect responds with their own, and a week has passed by by the time something is planned.
A prospect’s enthusiasm in what you’re providing may wane as time passes, or they may connect with a rival company while you’re spending time attempting to set up a meeting. A scheduling tool eliminates the time-consuming communication required to set up a meeting or phone conversation. Rather, simply send a link to your calendar or a list of open time slots. Following that, leads and prospects can choose a time that is convenient for them.
Related: How to Set Appointments with Mid to Large Enterprise Firms Contacts
Enriching Leads
It’s unlikely that simply knowing a lead’s name and work description will be enough to complete a high-quality transaction. To create a genuine connection that leads to a signed contract, you’ll need as much information as possible about the lead, their company, and their industry.
Finding the information, like every other item on this list, takes time. You might easily waste hours of your day just learning about leads and businesses. Lead enrichment tools pull information about your leads and the organizations they work for from internet data sources, providing you with a comprehensive, accurate picture of the person you’re attempting to contact.
Related: A Step-by-step Guide to Building and Profiling the Right B2B Leads List
Conclusion
When automating a sales process, it’s important to keep an eye on how well the system is operating. It’s inevitable that you’ll make mistakes, and allowing thoughtless blunders like sending the wrong follow-up message or using the wrong lead name to slip you by might damage your reputation with a potential customer.
Keep including more automation tools into your process, and you’ll be able to find new and innovative methods to aid you and your sales team in the areas where your sales process needs it most.