Sales automation software can be valuable for accelerating and growing a company. Get a quick refresher on what sales automation tools do, and then explore ways automation will accelerate your business. This guide will cover topics such as:
All companies look for ways to grow and accelerate, and sales automation software can be a valuable tool in doing so. Get a quick refresher on what sales automation tools do, and then explore just part of the long list of ways that this automation will accelerate your business.
Before exploring how a sales automation platform can accelerate your business, make sure you understand what sales automation is as well as what these tools can and can’t do.
Sales automation is the process of using software to automate the repetitive tasks involved in all stages of the sales process. These manual, time-consuming tasks include the following:
The idea is that sales process automation lets your team focus on more important tasks. That, in turn, improves their productivity and your business’s bottom line.
Depending on the tools you have and the needs of your business, you use sales automation tools for the following tasks and workflows:
Now that you know how many tasks can benefit from sales automation, how can it accelerate your business?
A simple yet important way sales automation accelerates your business is by improving productivity and efficiency. Automation saves your team the hassle of having to complete boring, repetitive tasks manually. That frees up their time to focus on tasks that require a personal touch later in the outreach campaign. Or they can focus on using the skills that you hired them for.
The ability to reduce costs is a direct result of any improvement in productivity, including via sales automation. Sales automation tools can free up more of your cash flow and even boost revenue by simplifying sales processes and freeing up agents’ time. Instead of spending time on creating reports and other administrative tasks, reps can focus on nurturing leads and finding ways to accelerate or expand your business.
Scalability is another major advantage of automating sales. Automating tasks that would have to normally be done manually can be completed in seconds. These tasks can be easily expanded or scaled up as your market grows as well. For example, automated lead generation software can just as easily generate 100 leads as it would 10 leads. It doesn’t matter if the process takes a little longer, as no one needs to actively put in effort for the algorithms to run.
Aside from allowing businesses to effortlessly scale up tasks, sales automation also helps you in standardizing your processes and workflows. Using one of the automation tools for small business requires a set process, as you have to program the LinkedIn prospecting automation to follow that process.
This means that when you grow your business, you don’t have to waste time figuring out the best sales email sequences, looking for outreach tips, or deciding how to complete any other workflows. You will already have a system in place to do so.
Modern businesses typically require a high level of multitasking, but that can slow down each task. Multi-tasking can even make it more difficult to complete tasks. But with automation, your team doesn’t need to multitask as often, as the best prospecting tools for sales will be handling certain time-consuming tasks for them.
One of the risks that comes with excessive multitasking is an increased risk of human errors, such as mistyping information or accidentally sending emails at the wrong stage of the sales pipeline. It also reduces the risk of accidentally entering the same information twice, which can affect the data.
But automated systems aren’t going to make the same types of errors that humans do. As long as you set them up properly, your outreach sales automation system will follow all of the sales prospecting best practices and won’t make input errors.
One of the biggest advantages of reducing the risk of human error via automation is the fact that you are less likely to lose leads due to error. This can happen at any stage of the sales funnel.
Early on, for example, what happens if your team mistypes an email address and you are never able to reach the lead in the first place? Or later in the sales funnel, what if they send an email out of sequence and confuse a lead, causing them to leave? There are similar opportunities for errors causing potential loss of leads throughout the sales funnel.
The lack of errors in your system not only helps when interacting with prospects. It also ensures that you have accurate data. Given the importance of that data in crafting your multi-channel sales strategy, data accuracy can have a significant impact on your ability to accelerate your business.
You can use sales automation as one of your strategies for how to generate leads in sales. That means that you will be able to discover more leads than you would without automation.
Of course, the ability to generate more leads means that even after going through your lead qualification checklist, you have more qualified prospects to reach out to. Even if your conversion rate remains the same, you will have a net increase in conversions.
Alfred makes it simple to find prospects on LinkedIn. The scraper software captures the information you need about prospects. Best of all, you can use it to generate leads from various parts of LinkedIn, including posts, groups, and events.
The top sales prospecting tools also improve the visibility of prospects. Simply put, your team can easily see the relevant information on your lead that the system collected, as it will all be stored in a convenient place.
This makes it easy for your sales managers to monitor individual prospects and track important trends. It also allows individual members of the sales team to track prospects that they are especially interested in.
Automation goes beyond just discovering leads and automating the sales qualification process. It helps you with one of the earliest parts of the typical sales pipeline stages – identifying your customers. You will need to do this before you can even start building a sales strategy, as your customers and their goals and preferences influence every decision.
But automation can give you crucial information about your customers via the data it collects. The use of metrics makes automated sales prospecting easy to analyze, letting you see who you successfully attract as customers.
You will gain insights into the demographics, challenges, preferences, backgrounds, and more of your customers. You can then use that information to streamline your sales qualification process, whether you complete that process manually or let your automation software handle it.
Alfred’s built-in CRM helps you gather additional information on leads. You can view the actions Alfred has performed for each connection and manage their contact information and other data. You can manage it within Alfred or export it in a .csv format to use however you want.
One of the many ways that automation tools accelerate your business is by making it easier and faster to close deals. This comes from the ability to automate various parts of the sales process. Since the lead nurturing process can be automated as well, leads may be readier to close deals at the end of the sales pipeline.
Using a sales automation tool will streamline nearly every single aspect of your sales pipeline. From collecting customers to filling the sales pipeline with leads to sending cold emails that get responses, automation is there for every step.
The overall result is that everything about your sales strategy and operations is streamlined. This means that the time to see results is reduced, sometimes despite seeing even greater results than before automation.
In addition to streamlining the sales pipeline, automation can also help monitor it. This monitoring lets you confirm you are on track after you create an automated sales funnel.
It also lets you look for errors, gather data, and make other improvements.
Best of all, you don’t have to spend days teaching multiple members of the team sales pipeline management best practices (although it would still be good for them to know). You just make sure to program your automation to follow those best practices and you will be set.
Remember that one of the many functions of the best sales automation software is collecting and analyzing data as well as generating reports. That data is incredibly useful for nearly every area of accelerating your business.
To start, it saves you the time that you would have to spend manually generating reports or gathering data. It also leads us to the next point: using the data to make informed decisions.
Having accurate, up-to-date data on leads, conversions, and other sales metrics is crucial. It lets you make an informed sales conversion strategy as well as informed decisions for every other aspect of your sales process. Decisions based on facts will do much better at accelerating your business than just guessing what to do.
The data collected from automation tools can do more than just help you make informed decisions. It can also guide informed forecasting or predictions. Use the information from your sales tools for prospecting to predict sales. Some platforms can even make predictions for you.
Data-based forecasting can help you set more realistic goals for your company and its growth. That is important for planning the future of your company as well as for morale. After all, when you consistently meet your goals, your team will remain motivated and are more likely to put in the required effort.
Importantly, whether you use the data collected by automation tools for forecasting or decisions, a sales automation platform ensures the data is accessible to those who need it. This prevents data silos and improves productivity across the organization. The best sales lead software will also let you control who has access to the data, making it easier to keep confidential information secure.
By ensuring that data remains accessible to everyone who needs it, you also facilitate improved communications. This is important as any successful sales strategy framework will involve people on various teams. Those teams need to be able to communicate with each other, and when they are all on the same page, it prevents misunderstandings and confusion.
In addition to accelerating your business, the best sales management software will also help you track that acceleration and growth. This lets you confirm that your efforts are working. It can also be incredibly helpful when attracting investors or competing for industry awards.
Accurate forecasting and achievable goals will also do wonders for your company’s ability to attract investors. So will being able to track your growth. This is especially important for companies that are still in the growing stages and need more investments or to apply for additional business loans for expansion.
One of the many time-consuming tasks included in your sales process is writing emails and other messages to interact with prospects along the sales funnel. But this is another task that your sales automation solution can handle.
The best sales email automation software will even have templates that you can use to further streamline the process of writing emails.
It should go without saying that the more emails you send, the further you can hopefully push prospects along your sales funnel, accelerating your business.
Alfred has a vast library with hundreds of templates for LinkedIn messages, emails, and more. This saves you the hassle of figuring out how to write outreach emails. You can also create your own templates to use.
In addition to helping you craft and execute the best email follow up and nurture sequences, the top automation tools will also let you add personalization. This is an important part of how to write a cold email, as personalization leads to engagement and conversions.
Alfred allows for a high level of customization in all of its templates. To start, you can easily have the system automatically add the prospect’s name, company, job title, and other basic information. You can also import a .csv file with additional information. Alfred will automatically capture the data in additional columns, giving you additional opportunities for personalization.
The entire point of sending emails to leads is to warm them up and then keep them warm. That moves them along the sales funnel, helping your business grow.
A savvy sales engagement platform will do this for you via emails and other interactions. A large portion of this goes back to the email templates and personalization found on top sales engagement platforms. The best platforms will even let you create long sequences of interactions.
Just remember not to be overly reliant on these automated messages to keep your leads engaged. You will eventually need to have your sales team directly interact with them. After all, many later stages of the process can’t go into an automated sales funnel, as they require a personal touch.
Alfred lets you create multi-channel sequences that are as long as you need them to be. Start with a message on LinkedIn, and then follow it up with a Twitter DM or email before going back to another one of the channels. Make the sequence as long as it makes sense for your customers and goals.
By keeping your prospects warm, automation and cold email tips also help you prevent lost prospects. Keeping prospects that you already put on the automated sales funnel is even more important than attracting new prospects.
After all, you have already gone through the process of qualifying prospects at this point and put in other efforts. That means that if you fail to keep the prospect warm, your past efforts may go to waste.
Alfred’s Greetings feature is an excellent tool to help prevent lost prospects. It ensures you never forget to send a message to your prospect on important occasions, such as their job anniversary, when they change jobs, or on their birthday. You just set it up and it will automatically send customized messages for those events and more. Use this feature to keep your leads warm.
Of course, you will still likely lose a few prospects, even with the best sales prospecting software. After all, no company can have a perfect conversion rate. But when you lose a lead or prospect, the loss is not as great if you acquired them with automated sales prospecting tools.
This benefit can be traced back to the fact that your time wasn’t spent completing all of the manual aspects of prospecting and converting leads. Much of it was automated while your team focused on other tasks.
Some prospecting tools for sales let you analyze communications in addition to automating them. This can give you an idea of what keywords or templates deliver the best results. That way, you can focus your efforts on those, making the most efficient use of your resources.
Depending on your chosen automation tool and your needs, it can also automate creating and editing of content, including business documents. For example, you can create templates for commonly used contracts and have your system fill in certain areas with personalization, much like you would with email templates.
When used properly, sales automation can improve customer satisfaction. That customer satisfaction is crucial for retaining customers as well as attracting new ones, including via reviews and referrals. Retaining and attracting customers is essential to growing and accelerating your business.
But how does sales automation improve customer satisfaction? Through these tools, customers don’t have to wait for a response to messages. Automated email sequences can keep them informed about your products or changes. The ability to use templates and automation to respond to customers means they get a faster response.
There is also the fact that your team has more free time. That means that when they do interact with customers, they will not feel rushed and will be better able to create a strong business relationship and connection.
The data collected by sales automation platforms also helps by giving you insights into your customers’ preferences. You can’t meet preferences if you don’t know what they are.
There is a very important caveat. You need to use your automation tools wisely to improve customer satisfaction. If you don’t understand how to automate your sales process while still including personalization and a human touch, your customers won’t be happy.
To avoid this issue, just avoid being overly reliant on automated processes and automation tools. Your sales prospecting funnel should combine automation and manual interactions that let your sales team connect with the customer in question.
All of the above points combine to give you a competitive edge thanks to your automation. That competitive edge helps you retain customers and attract customers from the competition. It’s also a huge advantage when it comes to accelerating your business, as you will be able to stay ahead of the competition.
Another major takeaway of the above benefits is that they work together to increase your sales volume. An increase in productivity means more sales, as does keeping leads warm, improving customer satisfaction, and nearly everything else on the list. That increase in sales volume is the key to accelerating your business.
To accelerate your business with sales automation tools, you will want to keep a few crucial tips in mind, including the following:
Integrating automation into your sales management systems and processes will help your team work more efficiently. It will also give you more data for better decision-making, deliver scalability, and keep your leads warm. As a result, automation can increase your sales volume, boost customer satisfaction, and give you an important competitive edge.
Alfred offers a range of sales automation functions, from prospecting to outreach messages to analytics and more. It is one of the top lead generation tools, dramatically improving your ability to generate leads from LinkedIn and other platforms.
Schedule a demo to see how Alfred’s automation can accelerate your business. Then, sign up for a free trial with no credit card required.
