A scaling business requires careful juggling of countless important tasks. Identifying growth opportunities, internal team management, budget coordination, and other tasks demand time and effort.
Your sales process is no exception. It’s a vital aspect of your business that takes up a lot of your time. Thankfully, automation can streamline your sales process and free you up for more pressing tasks.
Perhaps you’ve looked into sales automation but you’re on the fence about it. There may be signs already in your business that you need to take action. Read on to discover five tell-tale signs you need to automate your sales process today.
Your sales team is struggling
Traditionally, sales is a people-centric process. Creating relationships and nurturing connections is crucial for convincing prospective leads to convert. And if you want to scale, you’ll naturally need more sales associates on hand to continue this process.
But budget constraints can prevent this vital business lifeline. And even then, time is a precious commodity that even large sales teams struggle to get the most from.
Sales automation condenses all the minutiae of everyday sales life into easy, one-tap tasks. It essentially lets a single team member do the work of many, whilst still maintaining a solid sales process throughout.
Adding automation to your sales process lets your team focus on the tasks that require a human touch. They can nurture bonds with existing customers, fine-tune their cold-calling scripts, and step in when there are any problems that automation can’t fix.
Ultimately, automation restores equilibrium to stressed-out sales teams, helping you grow with the wind at your back.
Too many leads are dropping out of the funnel
Some of your leads will drop out of your sales funnel — that’s a fact. You can’t get every lead to convert, so you just have to chalk it up as a loss.
But when high numbers of leads fall out of your funnel, it’s a tell-tale sign that something’s amiss. And the problem could lie in your lead nurturing.
Nurturing your leads involves sending them relevant content that keeps them engaged through the sales funnel. Product information, comparison guides, user reviews — this content is crucial for nurturing prospective customers.
Sales automation nurtures your leads with relevant, useful content across a range of channels. Email marketing, social media, landing pages and more all play a role in delivering this content to your customers, and sales automation gets it right every step of the way.
Related: Best Lead Nurturing Outcomes: Insights from Parenthood
You spend too much time on repetitive, manual tasks
Look back on the past month and consider how you spent most of your time. Were you looking into new opportunities or initiatives to scale your business? Or were you bogged down in mindless, repetitive sales tasks such as list-building or coordinating email campaigns?
If it’s the latter, then it’s probably time to automate your sales process.
One of the key benefits of automation, not just for digital industries, but for every industry, is that it reduces the time spent on arduous manual tasks. Lead nurturing, email sequencing, landing page optimization — these are all necessary but time-consuming processes that sales automation can do for you.
This doesn’t just save you time to spend on more valuable business-oriented tasks. It also boosts productivity, streamlining your business and giving you more bang for your buck.
Related: Sell Smarter with these 6 Email Marketing Automation Workflows
You’re struggling to segment your leads
Segmentation is key to an efficient sales process. It’s data-backed, customer-centric, and is proven to increase conversions.
But strong segmentation demands comprehensive consumer data and intelligent insight. This is often out of the reach of time-poor sales teams, but it’s something you shouldn’t neglect.
Indeed, segmentation and personalization are the foundation of a successful sales process.
As marketing automation expert Brad Martineau says: “What you’re optimizing is the message, you’re optimizing the sources that are coming in to make sure you get the right people and you’re delivering the right message.” Sending the right message to the right consumer at the right time boosts conversions and increases lead generation.
Such a strategy capitalizes on unique customer information such as age, gender, interests, and so on to provide relevant information during the sales process.
Sales automation performs your segmentation and personalization to an art. It plugs into the systems you use to glean depths of comprehensive customer data and turns it into actionable insights that increase your campaign success.
This isn’t something restricted to big brands with big budgets either — any business, no matter how small, can enjoy intelligent segmentation. As a result, you’ll enjoy more successful campaigns and higher conversions into the bargain.
Related: Approaching Psychographic Segmentation In B2B Marketing
You’re struggling to track the ROI of your strategy
Tracking the return on investment (ROI) of your sales strategy is crucial for success. Getting solid sales data helps you better understand how your strategy is performing, what you’re getting right, and what you’re doing wrong.
Such an important part of your sales process shouldn’t be half-baked. It needs to be calculated and granular in order to guide your direction in the right direction.
But unless you’ve got a team of analysts at your disposal, then you’ll likely struggle to achieve this, even with time on your side.
Sales automation makes calculating your ROI easy and accurate. It collects data from your various sales and marketing tools — your email and social automation, your CRM, your POS system — and calculates your ROI for you.
Beyond this, many sales automation tools also let you generate reports on a range of metrics. You can get granular on a variety of aspects of your sales process, from the success of individual channels (such as online marketplaces like Amazon) to the percentage of repeat customers you receive.
Tracking ROI is vital for making smart business decisions. Sales automation gets it right the first time to help you make the right choice for your business.
Conclusion
For many, sales automation seems like a luxury. But when it saves you time and effort and increases conversions, it’s actually a vital necessity. If your business is showing one or more of the signs above, it might be time to embrace sales automation today.