Every salesperson is aware that automation is key to a successful sales process. It helps eliminate tedious sales tasks and keeps track of activities while monitoring your team’s progress.
However, the question of “how to automate sales process” often arises. While we know that sales automation is crucial, the execution can get tricky for many salespeople.
This blog has covered various effective ways to help you automate your entire sales process effectively.
So, let’s get started!
9 Ways to automate your sales process for various stages
Creating automated sales processes is crucial and helps eliminate the manual efforts of your sales rep.
Moreover, when you implement sales automation in your sales process, you can build an effective sales pipeline and grow overall revenue.
Many sales teams have started automating their manual tasks using any one type of sales automation to get the opportunity to work on the most crucial activity – selling.
Below we have provided insights into which sales managers can automate their sales process at each stage with sales automation tools or CRM (customer relationship management) software.
There are many sales automation benefits, so you can
1. Prospecting
Prospecting is the initial stage of a successful sales process. This is the stage where you create a buyer persona of your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and create an outreach strategy.
At this phase, to automate the sales process, you should focus on:
Using pre-defined email templates
Sending personalized emails
A/B testing email campaigns
Automating your outreach
Measuring performance
And so on. You can generate more sales leads and enhance brand awareness by executing automated email campaigns. In addition to these, you should consider adopting other prospecting activities like:
Cloud calls
Virtual phone system
Text templates
And so on to your process. While automating the prospecting stage, Built-In Calling and Text Messaging features are inevitable.
These features allow your reps to save time on repetitive tasks and invest it in activities that require their attention.
So, now you know which activities of your sales reps during the prospecting stage can be automated.
You need to ensure that you are using an advanced sales automation platform. It will ease most of your reps’ outreach and will be a great addition to automating your sales process.
2. Qualification
The next stage after prospecting is qualifying the lead. It is always safe to ensure proper delegation and management of leads before moving down the funnel.
Your goal should be to automate activities like lead segmentation, lead assignment, lead scoring, and so on.
Managing and segmenting leads is a tedious task that is time-consuming for you and your reps. Hence, these activities should be an avoidable part of your goal, I.e., to automate sales process.
Also, manually assigning leads is one of the most time-consuming activities for a manager or a sales team lead. So, automating the lead assignment activity is another good thing to do for yourself while automating the sales process.
Similarly, lead scoring should also be an essential aspect of automating sales process. Lead scoring will help you prioritize your leads based on their response.
Another addition to this stage is Data Entry Automation. This feature automatically syncs and tracks your emails, meetings, follow-ups, etc, and eliminates the need for manual data entry.
When you adopt a great Sales Automation Software, you can easily automate certain tasks and save time.
Hence, this is how you can automate sales process at the qualification stage.
3. Appointment
Setting up appointments is integral to the sales process and the managerial role. You must attend management meetings, team meetings, training meetings, client calls, etc.
Keeping track of all these meetings amid a busy schedule is difficult. Hence, automating your remainders and scheduling meetings should be the next step in the sales automation journey.
Meeting Scheduler allows you to book meetings for yourself and your teammates and set up client calls. It allows you to share the meeting link with concerned attendees.
Hence, appointments can be fixed with a few clicks using suitable automation features. This point should be a mandatory addition while you automate sales process.
4. Proposal
Sending proposals is a very crucial and time-consuming activity for your sales reps. You need to ensure that the requirements are met entirely and send them on time and to the concerned person.
Automating this step will save your reps immense time and ensure zero human error. With the proper implementation of CRM, you can integrate the right tool for sending proposals. Also, ensure that you never miss the timeline.
Hence, while planning to automate sales process, you should never miss automating your proposal activity.
5. Negotiations and objection handling
After sending proposals, the next task is to deal with negotiations. Since this is totally subjective, you cannot automate it. However, you can use various automation tools to communicate and schedule your conversation.
Similarly, objection handling is a part of this stage. Since objections are never pre-determined and are subjective, you cannot automate the response. But you can always send automated emails, provide case studies, and share customer success stories to help them understand the product.
Moreover, you can automate follow-ups if your prospect doesn’t revert.
Hence, by automating the communication channels and other aspects, you can ease your negotiations and objection handling stage of the sales process.
6. Follow-ups
Follow-ups are unsaid tasks of every sale process. They are repetitive actions taken with a single idea to close the deal.
These follow-ups take place through a combination of various communication channels like text, calls, and emails.
Sales Sequence is an ideal feature to automate your follow-up activities. It eliminates the manual work for your reps and saves their valuable time.
7. Closing
Here, you perform the task of closing your deals. Hence, it is a bottom-of-the-funnel activity. While closing the deals, the important task is to complete the documentation using automated templates and tasked processes.
This includes the signing of contracts. You can automate this activity by integrating your sales automation tool with DocuSign.
This integration will help you negotiate, access the document at your convivence, streamline workflow and get your documents signed faster.
8. Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is nurturing your leads till they turn into your paying customers. Throughout the lead nurturing process, your reps engage in many activities.
Manually, nurturing your leads is time-consuming, lengthy, and highly probable of human errors. You must implement the most suitable sales automation software to carry your lead nurturing process seamlessly.
How Salesmate can help you automate your sales process
Salesmate is a unified customer platform to engage prospects, boost sales, and create a personalized experience for every customer.
Salesmate allows you to prospect, engage, sell and nurture your leads all from one platform. At the same time, it lets you effortlessly manage your activities and reps.
So, Salesmate is one of the best sales automation software efficient tools to start your sales automation journey and grow your business.
Try it yourself; sign up to unlock your 15-day free trial.
Final thoughts
I hope that after reading this article, you gained insight into how to execute an automated sales process.
When it comes to automation, you can implement it at every step of your sales process. And with the right sales automation software, you can speed up the entire process and improve the productivity of your sales teams.
Sales reps are constantly juggling their never-ending activities. Whether it’s sales outreach, managing leads or coordinating with the team, a sales rep needs to manage multiple tasks. To improve the
Many small-sized SaaS companies don’t reach their full potential because they focus on doing everything manually. While other SaaS companies can’t move towards workflow automation due to the high cost
Sales growth never happens by accident. It is a result of meticulous planning and continuous effort. Have you had one of those days when you feel like you were not focused and did not get enough done
Every salesperson is aware that automation is key to a successful sales process. It helps eliminate tedious sales tasks and keeps track of activities while monitoring your team’s progress.
However, the question of “how to automate sales process” often arises. While we know that sales automation is crucial, the execution can get tricky for many salespeople.
This blog has covered various effective ways to help you automate your entire sales process effectively.
So, let’s get started!
9 Ways to automate your sales process for various stages
Creating automated sales processes is crucial and helps eliminate the manual efforts of your sales rep.
Moreover, when you implement sales automation in your sales process, you can build an effective sales pipeline and grow overall revenue.
Many sales teams have started automating their manual tasks using any one type of sales automation to get the opportunity to work on the most crucial activity – selling.
Below we have provided insights into which sales managers can automate their sales process at each stage with sales automation tools or CRM (customer relationship management) software.
There are many sales automation benefits, so you can
1. Prospecting
Prospecting is the initial stage of a successful sales process. This is the stage where you create a buyer persona of your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and create an outreach strategy.
At this phase, to automate the sales process, you should focus on:
And so on. You can generate more sales leads and enhance brand awareness by executing automated email campaigns. In addition to these, you should consider adopting other prospecting activities like:
And so on to your process. While automating the prospecting stage, Built-In Calling and Text Messaging features are inevitable.
These features allow your reps to save time on repetitive tasks and invest it in activities that require their attention.
So, now you know which activities of your sales reps during the prospecting stage can be automated.
You need to ensure that you are using an advanced sales automation platform. It will ease most of your reps’ outreach and will be a great addition to automating your sales process.
2. Qualification
The next stage after prospecting is qualifying the lead. It is always safe to ensure proper delegation and management of leads before moving down the funnel.
Your goal should be to automate activities like lead segmentation, lead assignment, lead scoring, and so on.
Managing and segmenting leads is a tedious task that is time-consuming for you and your reps. Hence, these activities should be an avoidable part of your goal, I.e., to automate sales process.
Also, manually assigning leads is one of the most time-consuming activities for a manager or a sales team lead. So, automating the lead assignment activity is another good thing to do for yourself while automating the sales process.
Similarly, lead scoring should also be an essential aspect of automating sales process. Lead scoring will help you prioritize your leads based on their response.
Another addition to this stage is Data Entry Automation. This feature automatically syncs and tracks your emails, meetings, follow-ups, etc, and eliminates the need for manual data entry.
When you adopt a great Sales Automation Software, you can easily automate certain tasks and save time.
Hence, this is how you can automate sales process at the qualification stage.
3. Appointment
Setting up appointments is integral to the sales process and the managerial role. You must attend management meetings, team meetings, training meetings, client calls, etc.
Keeping track of all these meetings amid a busy schedule is difficult. Hence, automating your remainders and scheduling meetings should be the next step in the sales automation journey.
Meeting Scheduler allows you to book meetings for yourself and your teammates and set up client calls. It allows you to share the meeting link with concerned attendees.
Hence, appointments can be fixed with a few clicks using suitable automation features. This point should be a mandatory addition while you automate sales process.
4. Proposal
Sending proposals is a very crucial and time-consuming activity for your sales reps. You need to ensure that the requirements are met entirely and send them on time and to the concerned person.
Automating this step will save your reps immense time and ensure zero human error. With the proper implementation of CRM, you can integrate the right tool for sending proposals. Also, ensure that you never miss the timeline.
Hence, while planning to automate sales process, you should never miss automating your proposal activity.
5. Negotiations and objection handling
After sending proposals, the next task is to deal with negotiations. Since this is totally subjective, you cannot automate it. However, you can use various automation tools to communicate and schedule your conversation.
Similarly, objection handling is a part of this stage. Since objections are never pre-determined and are subjective, you cannot automate the response. But you can always send automated emails, provide case studies, and share customer success stories to help them understand the product.
Moreover, you can automate follow-ups if your prospect doesn’t revert.
Hence, by automating the communication channels and other aspects, you can ease your negotiations and objection handling stage of the sales process.
6. Follow-ups
Follow-ups are unsaid tasks of every sale process. They are repetitive actions taken with a single idea to close the deal.
These follow-ups take place through a combination of various communication channels like text, calls, and emails.
Sales Sequence is an ideal feature to automate your follow-up activities. It eliminates the manual work for your reps and saves their valuable time.
7. Closing
Here, you perform the task of closing your deals. Hence, it is a bottom-of-the-funnel activity. While closing the deals, the important task is to complete the documentation using automated templates and tasked processes.
This includes the signing of contracts. You can automate this activity by integrating your sales automation tool with DocuSign.
This integration will help you negotiate, access the document at your convivence, streamline workflow and get your documents signed faster.
8. Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is nurturing your leads till they turn into your paying customers. Throughout the lead nurturing process, your reps engage in many activities.
Manually, nurturing your leads is time-consuming, lengthy, and highly probable of human errors. You must implement the most suitable sales automation software to carry your lead nurturing process seamlessly.
How Salesmate can help you automate your sales process
Salesmate is a unified customer platform to engage prospects, boost sales, and create a personalized experience for every customer.
Salesmate allows you to prospect, engage, sell and nurture your leads all from one platform. At the same time, it lets you effortlessly manage your activities and reps.
So, Salesmate is one of the best sales automation software efficient tools to start your sales automation journey and grow your business.
Try it yourself; sign up to unlock your 15-day free trial.
Final thoughts
I hope that after reading this article, you gained insight into how to execute an automated sales process.
When it comes to automation, you can implement it at every step of your sales process. And with the right sales automation software, you can speed up the entire process and improve the productivity of your sales teams.
Dhanashree Pal