Did you know that sales representatives spend over two-third of their time in non-selling activities?
According to a Forbes report, sales representatives only dedicate 35.2 per cent of their time selling, and only 22 per cent of salespeople use a time management plan. Administrative tasks, manual data entry, scheduling tasks such as calls, meeting and emails take up the majority of sales representatives’ time, leaving very little room for actual selling.
Here is where sales automation can help.
Sales automation refers to automating manual, repetitive and time-consuming sales tasks with the help of software, digital tools and other technology such as Artificial Intelligence. It can help salespeople gain more target and conversion rate by eliminating unnecessary burdensome daily activities.
With automation, sales teams can focus more on critical functions such as building relationships, nurturing leads and closing more deals.
Sales automation software automates tedious administrative duties including CRM data entry tasks, scheduling calls, meetings, appointments, emails, and helps salespeople focus their time and efforts on selling products.
In this article, we discuss the benefits of automating CRM and sales activities in detail.
1. Maximizes Efficiency and Productivity
By automating repetitive daily activities, sales teams can free up time, be more productive and focus on more important activities such as selling. Helping them close more deals and meet targets faster.
2. Accurate Results
In sales, it is important to have accurate data and information as it can affect business reporting.
Automation streamlines the entire sales process and eliminates human error and inaccuracies, providing much more reliable data about clients, deals, pipelines, sales reports and forecasting.
3. Build Better Relationship with Customers
Sales is all about interacting with customers and delivering and managing their expectations to achieve the most favourable outcome possible.
This process often requires a lot of time and effort. So, it is important for sales executives to automate certain elements that will help speed up the sales process in order to maximize efficiency and overall performance from team members. A useful tactic can be to automate reminders and follow-up emails. By automating these processes, sales professionals can save a lot of time for other actions that can help advance the business further.
Automation speeds up sales and reduces overhead. It helps you revert to prospects faster and provide them quality time and attention. This will in turn lead to higher conversion rates, customer satisfaction and referral rates. After all, customers prefer talking to real people to help them with their challenges than deal with a bot! Letting automation software handle the mundane aspects of sales helps declutter your team’s schedule with simple tasks such as responding to customers.
4. Increase Sales and Improve The Bottom Line
Email-triggered messages from salespeople can send vital information to potential customers at the best possible time during the buying cycle. For example, if a deal has stalled in the “In Decision” stage for 30 days, a salesperson could ask about the planning and decision-making process, while pinpointing exactly where in that cycle it is bogged down so that they might better determine next steps with this information in mind.
Certain sales decks are utilized across the company to ensure that everyone follows their designated plan as closely as possible. When a new opportunity arises, an email can be crafted to match prospect pain points and align perfectly with the kind of content they have already consumed. This inspires interest on the consumer end and paves the way for open communication between them and salespeople.
5. Personalization
Establishing an emotional connection through marketing can be extremely powerful. The more connected your prospects feel with your brand, the more likely they are to take action in response to your calls-to-action.
Salespeople can include personalized information in their emails and landing pages, and send out relevant offers that match customers’ schedules or interests as well. For example, you can create an event calendar that matches up with your product offerings and send it out at specific times based on any given customer’s previous interactions with you. This curates a unique experience for each prospect, which also improves open rates because of the personal element that goes into these messages.
Automation tools such as SARA AI are increasingly being considered and adopted by organizations worldwide to streamline sales processes and boost revenue. SARA can sync with your CRM, Outlook and Google to manage emails overload, planning meetings, invitations, rescheduling and more. If you’re looking for an effective sales automation tool for your organization, request for a demo.