From discovering new prospects to getting in touch with them and eventually closing the deal, salespeople perform a plethora of tasks every day.
In between all this lie the manual and mundane tasks of sending emails, following up with prospects, or even updating records.
Enter sales automation. Sales automation takes these everyday time-consuming tasks and runs them for you. This helps salespeople become more productive, efficient and even avoid the aspect of human errors.
A software that takes care of sales automation is called an automated sales platform.
Why do you need an automated sales platform?
Picture these unproductive tasks performed every day by your salespeople:
- Filling out backlogged paperwork instead of immediately following up with new prospects
- Typing the same email multiple times to different prospects instead of saving it as a template
- Going through every single lead manually to qualify them
- Manually sending an invoice when a prospect is ready to convert into a paying customer
The goal, essentially, is to spend as much time selling and letting an automated system take care of these time-consuming tasks wherever possible.
Automation helps you streamline key tasks, increase efficiency, and improve task accuracy by taking care of the entire process for you.
Here are five ways an automated sales platform can help your business.
1. Send welcome emails and instantly follow up with prospects
Let’s say you have about ten prospects to whom you have to send welcome emails on a particular day. Sounds relatively easy, right? What if you have a hundred? Or 150? Sure, you can individually edit their names and send them welcome emails separately, but this is the time taken away from your core job: selling.
Use an automated sales platform to set up a series of emails and automatically send them to new prospects. And the best part is, this isn’t only limited to welcome emails. You can even follow-up with them later on, notify them about discounts, send product brochures, wish them on occasions, and nurture them.
You can simplify this entire process with an automated sales platform like Freshsales, which allows you to set up email workflows in a few clicks and helps you become ultra-productive, having to focus only on what matters: selling.
Learn more about email campaigns
2. Manage and qualify leads with minimal effort
Unlike other methods of lead capture, an automated sales platform captures all their information too. So, you won’t have to worry about manually updating fields after they enter your system.
Sales automation software also helps you qualify leads without human intervention by assigning a set of unique parameters to your sales process.
Freshsales automatically provides you with a complete view of leads and contacts with information such as marketing campaigns they’re a part of, product or service they’re interested in, their decision-making authority in the organization, and more. This helps you have contextual information right from the get-go and helps tailor your conversations with them better.
You can also qualify leads automatically by setting up parameters according to your customer journey and sales process to ensure that the leads keep moving forward without any human intervention.
Learn more about contact management
3. Get timely reminders and run upsell and cross-sell campaigns
You may have upsell and cross-sell opportunities with the same customer, but you might miss out on them without timely reminders from an automated sales platform. Since this software has complete buyer information from when they make their first purchase, you get reminders when they are due for renewal and smartly upsell or cross-sell to witness conversions.
Freshsales automatically sends you timely reminders whenever your customers are due for another purchase. You can also set up sales sequences to be sent at well-spaced intervals and cross-sell your other products or services to maximize conversions and increase sales revenue.
Learn more about reminders
4. Generate reports automatically and optimize sales performance
Performance reports help you keep track of your sales performance either weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. As a sales manager, it can be difficult to generate them manually with the numerous tasks you have every day. Or worse yet, manually compile numbers and develop them from a spreadsheet. An automated sales platform allows you to automatically trigger custom reports right to your inbox in specific time intervals. So, every week, month, or quarter, you know for sure that a comprehensive sales report will be in your inbox.
Freshsales’ automated sales platform allows you to have a custom report dashboard that shows you a glimpse of all relevant sales reports for a time period so you can take quick action. You can also dive deeper into metrics, generate reports that matter to you, and spend more time identifying and fixing any roadblocks your salespeople encounter.
Learn more about sales reports
5. Manage pipeline, forecast sales, and predict revenue effortlessly
Spreadsheets and other tools store data, sure, but they keep you in the dark regarding some key factors such as how much you are likely to make in a month. An automated sales platform forecasts your sales for the month based on your current sales data. With this AI-backed information, you can understand how likely the deal is to close.
You can also set up workflows based on your sales process to move deals from one stage to another, or even a completely different pipeline automatically.
Freshsales forecasts sales in two ways: best-case or commit. While the salesperson can earmark the former category based on the deals they know will close, the latter can be marked to show that these are deals that the salesperson will definitely close in the month or quarter.
Learn more about sales forecast
Freshsales is an end-to-end automated sales platform that allows you to manage your pipeline, input data, send an email or a series of emails, and generate reports in a single system.
Try Freshsales today, free for 21 days, and feel the difference.
