How to Automate your Sales Process to Save Time & Money
Automating specific aspects of your sales process will save you time and money. The functions you will want to automate include lead generation, lead qualification, welcome and follow-up emails, meeting and demo scheduling, and sales territory map creation. These processes are known to be time-consuming and, once automated, it will allow time for things that require the human touch, such as closing a sale.
Automating your sales process is all about streamlining manual and time-consuming sales tasks. It has many advantages. For instance, it helps to increase your sales reps' productivity and performance. It can also improve your sales process accuracy by keeping all customer data consistent across the organization. All this results in your sales team having more time to spend on critical tasks and actual selling.Sales Automation—Where to Start?
Before you can do any automation, you first need to identify the parts of your sales process that can be automated, along with the exact tools that will help you do it. To help you get started, here are a few common elements that you can easily automate.Building Your Lead List
Lead generation is a crucial part of any sales process. However, not all leads are created equal. To avoid wasting time building a lead list with a low potential to convert, you need to pay attention to your lead list-building activities and choose the best leads right from the start.
Fortunately, this process is easily automated. In fact, there are a variety of dedicated tools that can give your sales team a high-quality, defined list of people to reach out to. For example, the tool LeadFuze can provide you with a long list of people who match your lead requirements. To get this list, all you need to do is choose the most important criteria for your business. This can be things like job title, location, and industry.Qualifying Leads
After generating a lead list, you'll still have to qualify and nurture them even if they're suitable leads. This is because even the best lead lists will include people who need more time to decide. Therefore, you can't treat them all the same.
However, figuring out which leads are qualified is not easy, especially if you don't have a lot of time to nurture each lead. This is where lead scoring systems come in. Lead scoring systems assess a lead's potential based on their previous actions so you can prioritize your prospects.Corresponding via Email
According to EmailAnalytics.com, sales reps spend about 21% of their day writing and answering emails. Although email correspondence is a crucial part of the sales business, you can reduce this amount of time with email automation.
To automate your emails, you first need to figure out what types of emails your sales team sends most often. For example, you can easily automate some emails like welcome emails to new leads or follow-up emails to unresponsive leads. This will free up your sales team to spend more time doing other tasks like designing lead magnets or preparing the pitch presentations.poScheduling Meetings and Calls
Scheduling calls, meetings, and product demos are a vital part of the sales process. However, the actual scheduling can take up a lot of a sales rep's time. For instance, it may take several emails before a suitable time is agreed upon by both parties.
Fortunately, you can automate this process with an appointment scheduling tool. These tools provide a link to a sales rep's calendar. The potential lead can then select the day and time that works best for them. Once this selection is made, the tool will notify the sales rep, and things can proceed from there.Creating Sales Territory Maps
Sales territory mapping involves laying out the geographic areas on a map that you will want to assign a sales rep to cover. To create automated sales territory maps, you will need to upload your leads to a map and then decide what criteria you'll use to divide up the leads. For instance, do you want to give out territories based on how many leads are in each area, or do you want to assign territories based on another factor like sales numbers, geographical boundaries, market size, or potential? The automation tool you use will then segment your map into territories based on the criteria you selected.
