Sales automation can be an effective way to improve sales and productivity, but not without knowing the best practices to properly integrate it into workflows. Sales teams go further when using automation and digital sales playbooks to fuel their efficient growth.
What's inside this article:
- What Is Sales Automation?
- Purposefully Automate Your Workflow
- Automate Tasks, Not Relationships
- Let Salespeople Do What They Do Best
- Use Sales Automation to Best Serve Clients
- Let Machine Learning Do More
- Aptivio's Understanding of Best Practices of Sales Automation
What Is Sales Automation?
Sales automation uses digital tools to complete time-consuming tasks usually done by salespeople. Automation encompasses a lot of different tools, types, and techniques. Successful automation can mean increased sales and more productivity so it's worth considering for sales managers. Combined with an autonomous sales prospecting tool, sales automation can elevate any sales team.
Know the Tools of Automation
There are several ways to automate the sales process using any number and combination of automation tools. This list highlights the best types of automation which you can read more about in The Ultimate Guide to Sales Automation.
- Prospect automation
- Lead management
- Communication automation
- Document management
- Automated research
Position Your Team for Success
Knowing the best practices of sales automation ensures that once you decide to use it, you position your team at the best possible start. Consider using accurate sales intelligence when establishing a new method in your sales process too. Sales narrative features and other automated tools offer new insights for salespeople and are key to strong sales teams.
Purposefully Automate Your Workflow
Knowing your purpose is a best practice of sales automation. Without knowing why automation is distinctly beneficial to your specific team, then you would just be automating for automation's sake. Having a more streamlined sales process or supplying salespeople with easy-to-use tools are perfect reasons to automate. To further equip salespeople for more informed selling, provide them with a digital sales playbook powered by artificial intelligence.
Sales Automation Comes With Many Benefits
Still looking for the benefits that fit your needs? Here's a longer list of reasons why sales automation helps teams do more.
- Identify potential revenue opportunities.
- Improve productivity and performance of salespeople.
- Become more efficient as a sales team.
- Accelerate the sales process while increasing accuracy.
- Reduce fall through of sales leads.
- Ensure rapid response times.
- Maintain sales data consistency across teams.
- Optimize resources for small teams or budgets.
- Seamless Salesforce and other CRM integrations.
Make an Automation Plan
After realizing your team's specific purpose for automating, you'll need to outline your individual automation plan. This step doesn't have to be daunting. With the help of comprehensive articles that can guide you in the right direction, you are already starting the next best practice of sales automation—making a plan.
Introduce Sales Automation
Have an open dialogue with your sales team to introduce and gauge interest in adopting sales automation tools into current workflows. Be curious about their perspective and ready for questions. Take this opportunity to also consider what else salespeople may benefit from, like intelligent market monitors that find new clients automatically.
Automate Tasks, Not Relationships
Best practices for sales automation means automating certain tasks and retaining expert salespeople. The promises of automation have been proclaimed for years, but not without some hesitation over impersonal relationships or job loss. Neither is true if automation is used correctly—to replace time-consuming tasks that are better done with digital assistance.
Think Client-First When Automating
Ultimately, what serves your client will serve your business, so keep that in mind when implementing sales automation. Complementary autonomous tools that offer customer account insights are an excellent addition to other types of automation and CRMs. These tools help sales teams stay informed about clients, sell efficiently, and manage churn risks.
Let Salespeople Do What They Do Best
Expert salespeople know how to cultivate meaningful relationships and automation shouldn't change that. One of the most important practices of automation is ensuring it helps, not hinders. Do this by implementing sales automation for repetitive tasks and processes that usually occupy salespeople. Match automation tools with a digital sales playbook and salespeople are positioned for their best chance at success.
