7 Key Components of Sales Process Automation

Did you know that sales reps spend only 35.2% of their time on selling? In fact, intentionally or unintentionally, the majority of their time is spent on non-sales activities like research and administration.

As a sales manager, you should try to minimise your reps’ involvement in non-sales activities and optimise their involvement in selling. That’s where the concept of sales process automation can help you.

Sales automation is the process of automating all manual activities for a sales team to ensure that reps are staying productive and are spending their time on the one top thing they’re supposed to do - selling. 

This article will discuss the seven key components of sales process automation to help you get started. 

So, let’s begin. 

1. Lead generation automation 

One of the first sales automation benefits is prospecting or lead generation automation. It can be challenging for a rep to generate new leads, nurture them, and convert them. Reps require some kind of assistance with all these, and the best way to deal with this is through sales automation software. 

A sales automation software can analyse the leads in your sales pipeline and assign them to the most skilled reps. It uses various factors like geographic location, past experience, and other specific criteria to assign reps with a prospect. This will surely improve your conversion rate.  

A sales automation tool uses static data and insights from your previous prospects to create a target prospect profile. In this manner, it can automate your lead generation process and find you the ideal prospects that best match your services. That means reps can spend less time on prospecting and instead concentrate on actually converting those prospects. 

2. Email marketing automation 

Are your reps spending hours on writing personalised, error-free email copies to convert leads? Well, let us tell you that that’s a waste of their time. According to HubSpot, up to 50% of personalisation is enough for your sales emails. Beyond that, it may bring negative results to your sales team. So, if you’re trying to leverage email marketing, do it smartly. 

You can just create a few email templates and automate the process. That way, they’ll reach your prospects’ inboxes without any manual effort from your reps. In fact, these email marketing automation tools come with advanced tracking features. They can help you discover super useful KPIs like open rates, Click-Through Rates (CTR), unsubscribes, and so on. Hence, setting up an insightful email campaign will become easier with such a tool by your side. 

3. Sales call analysis automation 

Do you monitor the sales performance of your reps? If you don’t know what or how much your reps are capable of, how can you assign them with relevant leads? You need a sales process automation tool to analyse your sales calls to provide you with actionable insights into reps’ performance. 

You can use SalesKen’s AI-enabled sales performance automation tool to avail the following benefits: 

• Capture and analyse all your sales reps’ conversations to identify different insights like clients’ needs, objections, and intent 
• Deploy advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to identify the clients’ intent depending on their emotions and conversations. 
• Offer targeted sales coaching to the reps and suggest strengths and improvement areas. 
• This sales automation tool works like your full-time sales assistant that helps your reps customise their sales pitches and win more sales deals.  
• SalesKen’s sales performance automation software helps your reps to ask winning questions and suggests effective rapport-building techniques to convert more leads. 

4. Contract management automation 

One of the most tedious activities that each sales team handles is related to contract management. Reps need to prepare and send a large volume of sales contracts and proposals regularly to close deals. How about getting an automation tool? Such sales process automation tools come with plenty of features and analytics and can expedite your sales process to a large extent. 

They help you create sales proposals, documents, and other collateral at the fastest speed. Plus, this software offers you an analytical overview of whether the prospect has opened the contract or not, any updates from the prospect’s side, and so on. Hence, you can easily leverage such an automation tool in your favour and improve your sales team’s productivity. 

5. Sales follow-up automation 

But manual follow-ups can be time-consuming. Writing follow-up emails every time or pasting the same follow-up emails over and over will only reduce your reps’ productivity. So, what you can do is simply create a few templates and then automate them. That’s basically scheduling your follow-up emails to ensure that you’re chasing each valuable lead twice or thrice. 

This can be a fruitful practice for your sales team. With sales automation software, you can always stay in the loop on what your prospects are thinking, in which stage of decision making they are in, and whether they are even considering your product or service or not. All this information can provide you with greater clarity over your sales strategy. 

6. Meeting scheduling automation 

Scheduling meetings is a regular task for the sales reps. But how convenient is it to send meeting invitations over email? Especially when you send an invitation and your prospect has some conflict with the time and they reschedule and so on. To put it simply, scheduling meetings over email can be a mess! 

So, how about using a sales process automation tool that takes care of scheduling meetings for your team? Such a tool provides your prospects with direct access to your calendar. That way, they can select slots that match both of your availability. All you have to do is add the scheduling link to your emails and the prospects can complete the rest on their own. This kind of secondary sales automation tool can save hours of time spent on countless emails. 

7. Guidance automation 

Your sales reps need guidance with the whole process. A B2B process automation tool that helps the reps during their sales journey can be a game-changer. SalesKen’s sales enablement tool can be your rep’s BFF when it comes to automated sales guidance. 

You can analyse the sales calls in real-time, identify the right hooks to convert the right group of customers, build data-driven sales strategies to qualify more leads and lots more! 

A Final Word

We hope that you now have a deeper understanding of sales automation and its benefits. Remember that your sales reps are already handling tricky activities like cold calling, lead qualifying and more. The last thing they need is for their organisation to make their job more challenging with tons of manual activities. 

SalesKen’s AI-enabled sales performance automation tool, discussed in depth earlier, can help streamline your sales activities.  Book a free demo today!