Imagine a sales team that could dedicate their entire workday and expertise to managing leads and securing sales. This fantasy is no longer a work of far-fetched fiction, but a reality in a modern world powered by automation software.
Too many repetitive, labour-intensive admin tasks bog down a talented sales team, but with sales automation software, their skills can be directed towards what matters most in your business – making sales.
What is sales automation?
Sales automation software executes the repetitive and laborious manual processes that a sales team would usually have to spend valuable time completing. With these repetitive tasks managed by a software tool, sales teams can put their full efforts and expertise behind closing deals and managing leads.
How sales automation works
Sales automation works by replicating the business processes a sales team would ordinarily oversee. Tasks which are repetitive and time-consuming can be “outsourced” to sophisticated sales automation software that can execute the tasks faster and more accurately.
By mimicking the inputs a user would execute during a process or workflow, the sales automation software can string together both simple and complex actions to automate the sales process.
Examples of sales automation
Sales automation software can be used in many ways, but here are some of the most frequently used examples:
- Sales reports: Develop detailed customer profiles or build custom sales reports, then automatically disseminate the reports to the right people in your team.
- Data extraction: Sales automation tools can scrape data from multiple file formats and upload it to a desired destination.
- Mailbox management: Software bots can monitor your sales mailbox and help manage it with a series of smart automated rules, such as forwarding, replying or synching data to a database.
- Invoice generation: Automatically generate an invoice and deliver it to the right contact from your chosen email account. This helps you push out invoices efficiently, accurately and on time.
- Lead scoring: Automatically identify engaged or sales-ready content. All your inbound messages and leads can be analysed for sales probability.
- Lead nurturing: Manage lead nurturing emails with ‘if’ rules. Create the sales content, then establish the conditions under which the bots automate.
- SMS campaigns: Create automated SMS campaigns at scale. You can send targeted sales offers to your database via text message. Software bots automate sending, then act on the results using your ‘if’ rules.
Best sales automation tools
In a sea of automation software and endless choice, some sales automation tools are better than others. Here are our top picks for sales automation software:
ThinkAutomation
ThinkAutomation is a business process automation software solution. Automate on-premises and cloud-based business processes to cut costs and save time.
This software can parse and extract data from any incoming message and perform business processes accordingly, such as updating on-premises and cloud databases, processing documents, leveraging ChatGPT AI for sentiment analysis, and much more.
Generate, nurture and message sales-ready leads with ThinkAutomation sales automation software.
Zapier
Build workflows to automate business processes with Zapier.
Zapier can handle your sales team’s admin work, such as pre-call research, activity logging, and order processing, so they can focus on closing deals.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp has simple sales automation functionality to help free up your sales and marketing team.
Automatically build customer journeys, set trigger emails, and react to customer behaviour with Mailchimp’s automations.
How to automate your sales process
A sales team spends much of its time completing repetitive tasks rather than generating leads and securing sales. Here is how to automate aspects of your sales process so you can supercharge your sales team:
Step 1: Choose sales automation software
There is an overwhelming choice of options when it comes to sales automation tools. One tool that does it all, with minimum coding knowledge, is ThinkAutomation.
Step 2: Decide which processes can be automated
Review your current sales process and tasks which your sales team perform every day. Chances are there are many data entry, lead follow-up and reporting tasks that can be automated.
Step 3: Implement automatic processes
Once you have identified the areas you want to automate, start building automations by stringing actions together to replicate the steps a worker would take. With ThinkAutomation, you can use simple ‘If this, then that’ logic to build process flows that execute multiple actions.
Step 4: Monitor automations and refine
When your automations are live, monitor their performance and outcomes to ensure they are producing the desired results. If you spot anything awry, refine your automation and assess the new process.
Step 5: Spend more time selling
With your sales automations set up, your sales team can spend more time selling and less time completing admin tasks.
What is an automated sales funnel?
An automated sales funnel is a digital system that helps streamline the customer journey. The automated sales funnel guides the customer through each stage – from initial awareness, to consideration, to conversion and final purchase. This is all achieved without the need for a salesperson or marketeer to directly intervene.
By automating the sales funnel, leads are generated automatically, and potential customers are converted into loyal customers through a personalised offering, customised to their tastes.
The benefits of automated sales
It is clear to see that by automating certain aspects of the sales process, your sales team can be unshackled to use their expertise in revenue driving tasks. The benefits of automated sales are:
- More sales: With more time to sell, your sales team will secure more sales.
- A productive sales team: No more wasted time spent on time-consuming admin tasks, more time spent selling.
- An efficient sales team: With admin tasks removed, your sales team can be made up entirely of expert salespeople, with no need for admin assistants to lighten the workload.
- Satisfied customers: Customers that receive prompt, personalised communications and offers feel more valued. Create loyal customers by automating your sales process.
- Decisions backed by data: Sales automation software is great for collecting valuable data on your customers. You can use this data to better tailor your offering to individual customers.
The difference between sales and marketing automation
Although sales and marketing automation software both do similar things, there are a few differences between the two.
Sales automation focusses on the entire sales funnel and streamlining processes within the entire sales channel to generate more purchases.
Marketing automation is directed towards automating marketing campaigns to help capture leads and point them to your sales funnel, where hopefully they are converted into sales.
Both your sales and marketing processes can be automated to free up more time for higher value tasks.