The ultimate guide to sales automation

What is sales automation?

Sales automation executes mundane and time-consuming tasks using a software, enabling your sales reps to become more efficient and ruling out the possibility of human errors. 

Sales automation is a way of automating repetitive tasks in the customer journey. It helps free up valuable time for sales teams, allowing them to focus on more fulfilling work.

It could simplify prospecting and lead generation, right through to lead nurturing, activity tracking, and forecasting. Sales email automation could also save you time when it comes to customer communications.

As a sales manager, your day-to-day tasks include setting your team’s targets, analyzing their performance, and predicting upcoming sales. On the other hand, your sales reps need to focus on prospecting, retaining existing clients, and making more sales to achieve their targets.

Some of these tasks are repetitive, and a waste of time and effort for your sales team that could otherwise be spent closing more deals. In many cases, these tasks can be performed without human effort using specialist sales automation software.

Sales automation tools take care of everyday manual tasks with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Ultimately, they can offer quick wins when it comes to sales team productivity and efficiency.

Why do you need a sales automation software?

There are plenty of reasons for your business to consider sales automation software.

On the one hand, this software helps boost efficiency and productivity, moving leads further down the sales funnel. On the other, it can save time and support morale by removing repetitive tasks from your team’s schedules.

The right system should improve lead generation and management too. For example, by identifying the most promising target customers. And ensuring they receive the right messaging – at just the right time. It also offers a way to create custom sales reports, without the need for manual data entry in spreadsheets. 

About 71% of C-level executives believe that sales productivity is essential for growth. And more than 30% of sales tasks can now be automated. However, according to a McKinsey study, only 26% of sales and marketing teams have automated at least one business process so far. It’s time to change this.

Sales automation can help you perform various day-to-day tasks with more efficiency. From sales prospecting to follow-ups, here are the key functions and practical applications it could support your company with.

What are the benefits of sales automation?

Sales automation tools offer a wide range of business benefits, including:

Increased productivity

The right software makes it easy to automate mundane, repetitive tasks that get in the way of more meaningful work.

Reduced errors

Removing the need for manual data entry lowers the risk of typos or incorrect figures entering your workflow.

Enhanced customer relationships

You can often combine sales automation with customer relationship management (CRM) tools. This could increase understanding of your target audience and help you to build more tailored strategies.

Single source of information

Sales reps are constantly juggling between multiple tools to access lead information. Sales automation software can remove this problem by keeping everything in one place.

Prioritizing your prospects

Automation can enable your sales reps to differentiate between hot and cold prospects based on scores. 

Better revenue predictions

Predict your sales with greater accuracy by automating sales forecast reports based on opportunities and buyer behavior.

Increasing sales revenue

Enable your reps to focus more on customers and less on admin by automating frequent tasks. Witness a boost in sales revenue.

Strengthening customer satisfaction

Improve customer satisfaction with quick responses by automating follow-up emails.

What can sales automation do for you?

Sales automation can help you perform various day-to-day tasks with more efficiency. From sales prospecting to follow-ups, here are the key functions and practical applications it could support your company with.

Sales prospecting

Sales prospecting is the way your company identifies potential customers – and gets in touch with them. The goal is to forge new customer relationships and drive fresh business.

The trouble is that sales prospecting can be time-consuming and even risky. For example, purchasing lead lists may be an easy way to acquire customers, but it comes with many cons. For one, the quality of the leads might be sub-par. And you could be in violation of the ‘CAN-SPAM Act’ or GDPR guidelines in the European Union. 

Meanwhile, endlessly searching on LinkedIn seems to be the go-to lead generation strategy for many. But it can prove to be exhausting.

However, the good news is that Sales automation can make it much simpler to identify and target potential customers.

For example, an efficient alternative to endless LinkedIn searches is either a Premium or Sales Navigator subscription that helps perform multiple searches with filters. 

Bryce Sanders, President at Perceptive Business Solutions, finds LinkedIn great for finding the right people and inviting them to connect and get a conversation flowing. Instead of leading with business (like many others do), he gets a conversation going via messages and goes ahead by identifying shared interests and proceeding from there.

Some sales automation tools also help you to find potential customers by identifying who visits your website – regardless of whether they fill out a form or reach out to you.

Lead enrichment and distribution

Finished the prospecting stage? The next step is to assign different prospects to your sales reps. But before you do that, some sales automation tools can help enrich data on prospects via social and publicly available information. And that gives your team the clearest possible picture of each customer.

As an added benefit, sales automation can ensure each lead is automatically distributed to exactly the right representative.

Assigning leads to your reps manually is painstaking. You can possibly assign three or four leads to various salespeople, but what if there is a larger inflow? A hundred? A thousand? There’s also the chance you might end up assigning a lead to the same rep multiple times. 

To avoid such errors, specialist sales automation software can assign leads based on factors such as: 

• territory

• company

• size

• vertical

Sales automation: Lead assignment tools

Here are some popular lead assignment tools that could make life much easier for your sales reps:

• Freshsales

• PipeCandy (can be used for lead enrichment as well)

• Marcom Robot Data Enrichment Engine

• BeforeHello

• OpenPrise

• Q-Assign

• Leadsruptive

• Leadassign

Prioritizing and qualifying prospects

Moving further along the journey, sales automation software can help you prioritize leads using a clear scoring system. Simply set up criteria like engagement levels or demographic factors and let an automated scoring system do the rest.

Once you have enough leads in your sales pipeline, your salespeople need to know whom to reach out to. Your reps can do things the old-fashioned way by researching each lead before contacting them. But that could prove time-consuming, with lots of legwork involved.

An automated system simplifies everything by assigning scores to your leads based on their engagement with your company or their social presence online. This is done using demographic and behavioral data to determine how qualified a lead is. Ultimately, it can keep your reps focused on the best opportunities. 

To successfully leverage sales automation tools that offer lead scoring, salespeople need to have all the right information about the prospects and their interaction with your organization, such as through website visits and email interactions. 

Sales automation: Prioritization and qualification tools

The following tools could help when it comes to identifying the most valuable leads for your business:

• Freshsales

• 6sense

• PX

• LeadBarrel

• LeadCapsule

• VanillaSoft

• Velocify Lead Manager

• Leadspace

Enhancing sales efficiency with follow-up automation

Sales email automation is another useful feature of specialist automation software. It could save your staff time when manually typing out emails, freeing them up for more important jobs. Automation can ultimately streamline the follow-up process and prevent any opportunities from slipping through the net. 

Your sales reps have to reach out to a prospect once they identify them. An ideal situation is if the prospect responds immediately. But what if the prospect doesn’t respond? Or, worse yet, what if your reps forget to engage with them?

Manually typing out emails and sending them, then waiting until a prospect responds, is time-consuming. Thankfully, help is at hand in the form of sales email automation. 

Automated and customized email sequencing at the right time is the best way to boost productivity and reduce data entry. Sales automation tools allow your reps to set up multiple emails to be sent at the right moment. Email templates containing content for a wide range of scenarios are also available, which sales reps can put to effective use.

Another handy sales automation tool is auto-call logging, which helps to record the call history for your reps. This important feature allows reps to save time on manually recording every call they take. 

Jim Wollenweber, a sales and marketing veteran, uses an automation tool that allows him to stay connected to clients even when there is no recent activity. He sends auto-generated emails to the thousand domestic clients he does business with depending on inactivity for up to 60 days – all through a sales automation tool. 

In a CRM tool like Freshsales, workflows can be created in a jiffy using a simple point-and-click interface. Using workflow templates, you can enable a workflow by simply clicking a button. By using nested conditions, you can create workflows with advanced logic too. You can automate the most complex business processes effortlessly, reduce manual dependency, and save time to sell more.

Sales automation: Follow-up tools

A range of follow-up tools are out there, offering features like sales email automation and more.

• Woodpecker

• Freshsales

• AutoKlose

• Invoca

• CallTrackingMetrics

• Reply

• GMass

• MailChimp

• MailJet

Deal management

Need help tracking and managing deals at different stages of the sales cycle? Sales automation software can keep you right on track.

A deal goes through many stages after it enters the sales pipeline. Manually managing every single one could easily cause information to slip through the cracks. In turn, that doesn’t help your sales reps who are working hard on closing deals.

But there’s no need to struggle in silence. Many sales automation tools now come with deal management capabilities. These allow salespeople to automate deal movement, based on parameters like engagement or activities by the prospect, across different deal stages. 

In some cases, you may have multiple pipelines. For example, if you have different sales processes for inbound or outbound leads. With the right tool, you can configure deals to automatically move from one pipeline to another.

Sales automation: Deal management tools

Popular deal management tools for sales teams include:

• Freshsales

• DealRoom

• DatasiteOne

• Midaxo

• NavatarEdge

Reports and dashboards

Analytics and up-to-date reporting are vital when it comes to decision-making. Having the latest performance data at your fingertips can back up your forecasts and business plans with hard evidence. 

Sales automation software can take the strain out of data entry while reducing the risk of human error. Wave goodbye to cumbersome spreadsheets and hello to automated reports.

As a sales manager, you have to evaluate the performance of your sales reps and understand how to optimize it for better results. You can manually create and send reports using spreadsheets, but this takes a lot of time and effort. 

Automated report scheduling and delivery move crucial information to the right people, at the right time – without requiring you to manually do anything. 

A sales automation platform can automatically generate and schedule reports, giving you the option to customize them according to various attributes and factors. 

This means you can generate a report to analyze an individual’s performance, an entire team’s overall performance, or even forecast the month’s sales figures. 

It helps you save time, track your sales cycle, streamline efficiency, and reduce mistakes.

Sales automation: Reporting tools

Here are some of the sales automation tools with efficient reporting at their heart:

• QuarterOne

• InsightSquared

• Freshsales

• Lightspeed Retail

• Rollio

Choosing a CRM for sales automation

While there are plenty of sales automation tools out there, the right customer relationship management (CRM) system can bring everything together. From contact management and pipeline tracking to communication history, a CRM could serve as the foundation for valuable sales automation.

A comprehensive CRM removes the hassle of using multiple tools by pulling different features into a single package. 

With Freshsales, you can: 

• automate follow-ups

• forecast sales

• assign prospects

• prioritize prospects. 

And you can do all this from a single location at an affordable price. Bolster your salesforce automation, set up sales email automations, track metrics in real time, and automate administrative tasks. 

Integrating sales automation with marketing automation

Chosen the right sales automation system for your business? It’s now time to consider the benefits of linking this up to your marketing automation tools.

As the name suggests, marketing automation is simply a way to automate  repetitive marketing tasks with the help of specialist software. These tasks could include everything from email marketing to advertising campaigns and social media posts.

Integrating sales and marketing automation can offer long-term benefits to your company. It could create synergies and break down barriers between the two departments, boosting efficiency and communication. This might pave the way to more effective lead generation and nurturing. 

Other potential benefits when combining sales and marketing automation include:

• Building richer leads through web tracking. Monitoring the web activity of prospects can feed into your sales efforts, creating a fuller picture of your target customers.

• Monitoring engagement via campaign tracking. By gaining insights into recent marketing campaigns, it’s easier to see the places where different people are engaging with your brand.

• More effective marketing through targeted engagement. Sharing data from your CRM system and order fulfillment software can highlight the wants and needs of customers to the marketing team. It may suggest specific products to focus their marketing resources on.

Choosing the right sales automation software

With so many options available, it’s important not to rush any decisions about your sales automation software. Here are some key questions to ask yourself first:

• What scalability does the tool offer? How would the software cope with a sudden increase in sales or customers, for instance? Will it deal with more complicated workflows and allow new users to come on board?

• Does it offer integration capabilities? How easily will the tool link up with existing CRM systems and marketing automation software, for example?

• How user-friendly is the interface? Does the software offer an easy-to-use dashboard? Or will your team require extensive training?

• Does it contain the right features for your business? Some firms may prefer tools that focus more on lead scoring, for example. While others might be more interested in sales email automation. 

• Will it meet your organization’s security standards? What compliance guidelines and restrictions do you need to be aware of?

• What is the overall cost of using the tool? Are there one-off fees or subscription charges to consider? Are any free trials available so you can test out the system first?

Common challenges in sales automation and how to overcome them

Sales automation offers a diverse range of benefits, with the potential to speed up and streamline the work of sales teams. But making the switch to automated systems isn’t always stress-free. And it might not happen overnight.

Here are some common automation challenges to consider – and how your firm might resolve them:

Getting buy-in from staff

Your sales automation efforts will struggle to get off the ground without widespread adoption. Resistance from certain staff members or a lack of knowledge could lead to patchy usage. Extensive training and employee education programs might help tackle this problem.

Inaccurate data

Your sales automation tool is only as good as the data that goes into it. Incomplete, incorrect, or old data could easily hit the accuracy of automations while creating negative customer outcomes. Regular audits and clear data entry rules can help businesses to overcome this hurdle.

Working in silos

A lack of integration with other apps or departments could harm communication and lead to missed opportunities. You might lose out on valuable insights, for example, or only get an incomplete picture. Choosing a tool with lots of integration capabilities is one way to solve this issue. Integrating sales and marketing automation is another potential solution.

Weak data protection

When gathering customer data, you’ll need to stay aware of privacy regulations – both within your country and the company. Any failure to handle data in the right way could lead to fines. Meanwhile, a large data breach could easily tarnish your reputation. Choosing a tool with strong security features should give you solid foundations to build on.

Trends and the future of sales automation

Sales and marketing automation is constantly evolving. You can’t afford to stand still, even with the latest tools to hand. Here are some of the main trends to monitor in the weeks and months ahead:

• The rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning and AI continue to hit the headlines. In the world of sales and marketing, they’re optimizing key areas such as lead scoring and segmentations.

• Chatbots. Conversational chatbots have opened up a whole new way for businesses to generate leads. Automated conversations can point potential customers in the right direction while saving valuable time and resources.

• Behavioral analytics. As customers leave longer digital trails, companies can use this data to better understand their interests and motivations.

• Mobile-first customers. From web browsing to social media apps, smartphones offer more capabilities than ever before. As customers come to rely on them for written and visual content, the technology can no longer be ignored.

• Social media automation. Amid surging customer usage and demand for regular communications, companies continue to adopt social media tools. Many social media processes can now be automated, removing the need for hour-by-hour manual monitoring.

Case studies and success stories

There are lots of ways to enhance a business via sales automation. But don’t just take our word for it. Here are three real-life examples of businesses that have used Freshsales to boost their processes:

Lori Systems

After adopting our tools, this logistics services company is now better able to monitor its team’s performance. Advanced reporting and objective sales activity metrics have created a clearer picture. We’ve also scaled our services, supporting Lori’s expansion into a new region.

Read the full case study

Kongskilde Industries

As Danish air solutions company Kongskilde scaled up, it needed a new sales system to match its growth. Freshsales was on hand to assist with deal management, sales forecasting, and offline access via our app, among other features. 

See the full case study

TKF Telecom France

When the sales technology of connectivity solutions provider TKF fell short, Freshsales was there to bridge the gap. We’ve supported the business by selling into large accounts and channel collaboration.

Learn more about this success story

Best practices for implementing sales automation

Implementing sales automation software will be different for each business. However, here are some common best-practice tips to consider:

Consider using a CRM system

A CRM system can combine lots of sales automation features, meaning you don’t have to flit between different tools for each task. 

Get to grips with sales email automation

Automatic follow-up emails can help you keep in contact with potential leads. They can also save your business time by removing the need for manual writing.

Embrace lead scoring

Automatic lead scoring can keep sales reps focused on the customers most likely to convert. It takes a bit of time to set up but could pay dividends in the long run.

Hold your team accountable

You can use advanced reporting features to keep tabs on your team’s progress. It could help you to hold each sales rep accountable for their work.

Automate invoices and billing

Not every tool will offer the ability to automate bills and invoices. But it might lead to greater accuracy and quicker payments.