What is sales automation?

Introduction

From controlling the thermostat in your smart home to operating a large industrial drill to dig for oil, automation is everywhere. When it comes to sales, automation can help you with a whole range of activities, such as sending alerts, creating emails, entering data, updating information, logging calls or meetings, and creating reports.

Workflow automation—of which sales automation is a subset—can handle complete processes from start to finish without human intervention, given that certain pre-defined conditions are met. Examples include onboarding new customers, reminding existing customers to renew their licenses on time, and forecasting critical events and impending losses in sales.

The great thing is that sales automation isn't just limited to the above examples. Based on your use case, your willingness to experiment, and the tools at your disposal, you can automate a whole lot more. The best part? The advent of AI has only expanded the number of ways businesses can apply sales automation to achieve a range of benefits, including convenience.

What is sales automation?

Sales automation is the process of using technology to perform repetitive human tasks to reduce time, effort, cost, and errors. The tasks that qualify for sales automation typically fall under one of these buckets:

• Data entry: Enrich your CRM with information on leads by integrating with a third-party source, usually a publicly available database such as LinkedIn or Crunchbase. Update lead information based on actions or activities performed, either by the leads themselves or by your sales team. For example, update last activity details when a lead interacts with your brand on social media or log calls and update notes automatically after a meeting or a demo.
• Workflow automation: Automate a series of interlinked tasks or activities that can be triggered when the lead or sales person completes a specific activity. This covers preparing quotes, sending quotes to customers for review, getting customers' approval, and sending reminder emails when customers fail to respond on time to your quotes.
• Data analysis: Crunching long-winded columns and tables down into bite-sized reports and charts is best left to automation. AI-led automated analysis can identify patterns, trends, outliers, anomalies, distribution, and relationships much faster than a team of your best data analysts. It can also analyze past data to recommend actions to maximize gains and minimize impending losses.
• Assorted tasks facilitated by generative AI: From crafting emails to suggesting the best mode and time to establish contact with leads, generating sales pitches, and even training your sales team to deliver the best demos and pitches, gen AI-led automation can perform a variety of tasks to improve rep productivity. 

The sales automation process

There are various types of sales automation, such as recurring or fixed automation, flexible or responsive automation, and process automation. Regardless of the type, the primary component that makes sales automation work flawlessly is data. As for the process, it can be broken up into the following stages:

• Define the trigger: The first step is to clearly define a unique trigger that kickstarts the automation. This could be a new lead signing up for your service, an inquiry from a recurring customer, or even a phone call to book an appointment.
• Qualify with conditions: Each trigger must meet certain conditions in order to trigger the automation to start. For instance, new leads from the lead source "webinar" should be sent email follow-ups, while leads from the lead source "service signup" should be scheduled for sales call-backs.
• Configure the right actions: Specify the sequence of actions and the frequency at which these actions must be executed once the records qualify for automation. You can configure one-step actions such as updating the lead owner for new leads based on product, location, lead status, and agent availability, or a multi-step action such as sending a series of personalized nurturing emails over a period of a month.
• Execute the workflow: The automation platform checks for the trigger event in your CRM on a time-based cadence and automatically executes the workflow when conditions are met. 

Four ways businesses benefit from sales automation

Did you know that sellers spend a mere 33% of their time actually selling? This means that in a typical eight-hour work day, each of your sales reps spend roughly 2.5 hours engaged in core sales activities. The rest of their time is spent doing non-critical administrative tasks. That's a lot of wasted hours for any business. By embracing sales automation, you can help your sellers slowly reclaim some of this time and use it more productively for sales.

Sure, sales automation saves time for sales reps. But sales leaders also get more control over their operations. In the absence of sales automation, sales leaders have to rely entirely on signals sales reps input themselves, which injects a fair amount of subjectivity into those signals. With sales automation, they can get real-time, objective stats on each operation executed via automation.

For example, if your sales team collectively agrees that leads from a particular tradeshow—a new marketing initiative—take twice as long to convert as compared to leads from other sources, you have to take it on good faith. Whereas the reality could be that the sales team is in fact inundated with way too many leads—which is a good problem to have—that they tend to overlook leads from this particular tradeshow. Instead, if you implement sales automation, you can automate the complete sales outreach process for tradeshow leads and collect stats on how well the outreach program works in converting these leads to customers.

Here's how sales automation can benefit any business:
 

1. Sales and activity data is always up to date, so sellers get to work with the latest data.

Anytime your sales rep retrieves a record, you can trust that it's always up to date. With sales automation, information isn't incomplete, missing, wrong, or worse: scattered in disjointed sales tools.

If your rep closed a demo a week ago, the prospect mentions on LinkedIn that they're signed up with your product and are impressed with your onboarding process, and your support team has scheduled a troubleshooting session this week, all this information will be available and ready to use in the CRM. So when the sales rep gets on a call with the customer, they can get all available information about the customer from the contact details page. Sales automation simply makes it easy to get all the information one needs, sorted and filed in one place, ready to use.

Sales automation can also lean into pre-built integrations with your business applications and populate information from those applications into the CRM. For instance, if an invoice sent to the customer hasn't been paid yet, your sales rep can view this in the CRM without logging into your accounting software. This makes it easy for the rep to send out reminder emails to prompt customers to honor the invoices. 

2. Automate a sequence of tasks based on pre-configured conditions so sellers can focus on selling.

Nothing wastes your sellers' time as much as doing repetitive administrative tasks. Sales automation can give your sellers the much-needed respite from performing mundane activities. Let's assume that you're running an educational institution that offers several classroom courses for high-school graduates. Anytime a student enrolls for one of your courses, you need to assign the student to the right courses, classrooms, and academic advisors, and provide access credentials to the student portal, which should be pre-populated with course schedules, dates, and faculty contact details. Imagine your sales team performing all these tasks manually; think of the number of emails, slack messages, and phone calls it would take to coordinate these activities and execute enrollment flawlessly.

The simpler solution is to use an automated workflow to carry out all these linked tasks seamlessly. Here's a sample workflow. 

Sales automation can condense a complex workflow, like the one above, into a set of trigger-driven activities and execute them without any errors.

3. View in-depth reports to derive insights and improve decision making.

CRM applications feature built-in reporting modules with pre-built report templates that can generate reports and dashboards. These can help you monitor critical sales operation metrics. Automated analysis can help take it one step further and point out trends, patterns, changes, anomalies, and outliers. This helps your sales team respond quickly to changes in the pipeline and keep it healthy. AI-led analysis takes it yet another step further by providing suggestions as to what your sales can do to correct course.

4. Both sales reps and customers can receive alerts to notify them of critical events or changes.

Given sales reps' daily average workloads, it's impossible to scan every account or deal in the pipeline for changes or updates. Automated alerts, prompts, and notifications draw sales reps' attention to pressing matters. This saves time, ensures efficiency, and keeps you on top of changes. Have a promising deal that hasn't contacted you after the third demo, a customer who's repeatedly failed to submit a signed contract, or a customer whose payment has failed to go through twice already? Instant alerts and notifications help ensure you never miss another critical event that can derail you from your planned revenue path.

You can extend notifications to customers as well to complete activities that were previously agreed upon. For instance, notify customers to renew their product licenses or service agreements; alert customers when the items in their shopping carts are about to run out of stock; remind customers to pay their EMIs, and more.

Areas where sales automation can complement your sales processes

Depending on the scale of your operations and the nuances of the sales processes you have in place, each team can leverage sales automation to solve a wide variety of use cases. Here are a few generic examples of how you can deploy sales automation to enhance and improve sales processes to save time and effort.

Lead management

Unless your business has no web presence, using webforms to collect lead information and auto-populate the data across various CRM modules is the easiest way to get started with sales automation. Once you have all the data you need, use automation to score new leads based on who is most likely to purchase your products or services. This can help sales reps prioritize leads and approach them with curated messages targeted for lead conversion.

Prospecting and outreach

Imagine this: You have a lead with some basic details, such as email, name, and company name. Now you need to collect details about the company manually, such as its size, the type and nature of its business, and revenue. Now imagine having all the details ready so you can easily build an ideal customer profile and start sending out targeted messages via email and phone from day one. That's what sales automation can do for you.

But that's not all; once you make the initial contact, you can nurture these leads over time using emails. Based on whether the emails were clicked on, opened, or responded to, you can configure further actions such as setting up calls, demos, meetings, and reminders for those events, with zero manual intervention. You can also leverage AI-enabled suggestions to identify the best times and channels to contact leads in order to improve your chances of success further.

Updating and enriching CRM data

So you wrapped up a call with a prospect? Use sales automation to log call details automatically. Transcribe the call and save a note. Create follow-up activities and set up tasks to nurture that prospect after your initial call using sales automation.

Enrich CRM with the latest data about changes without manual effort. Automatically update deals as "closed won" when customers make a payment on your booking or accounting app. Delegating mundane work like this to automation saves you time and ensures the data in your CRM is always accurate.

Pipeline management

Sales processes can be vastly different between two or more sales teams, but the conditions to qualify deals from one stage to the next should always be the same. Automation can help streamline the qualification process and ensure that each deal is in the right stage. For example, you can specify that a deal can be marked as "closed won" only if the payment is complete and not simply when a purchase order is received. This helps keep the pipeline data clean and healthy, and provides decision-makers with a clear—and not inflated—picture of actual progress. As a result, any forecasts built using this pipeline data are reliable and produce accurate forecasts.

Quoting and proposals

Salespeople spend a large portion of their time preparing legal contracts, proposals, and quotes. These contractual obligations are binding and signify commitment, so they have to go through rigorous edits and reviews. All of this takes time—time that your sales team could put to better use by selling your products.

Using a set of pre-defined templates to generate custom quotes, proposals, and contracts ensures these documents are error-free, hastens approvals, and saves time. Since your CRM already has all the customer data you need, creating a proposal or a quote should be as simple as clicking a couple of buttons.

Reporting and analytics

Your CRM is a vast hub of data. Manual analysis and reporting on this data can be tedious and can also inject bias when performed by humans. But if you rely on data analysts to prepare sales reports and dashboards, you also risk losing context. AI-led automated reporting can solve all these challenges and deliver insights in your inbox to help you get critical decisions right the very first time.

Customer follow-up and nurturing

Your sales funnel ends when a prospect converts into a paying customer. But customers' journey with your brand goes far beyond the sales funnel. When nurtured and supported well, customers go on to become ardent advocates who promote your products or services within their networks.

Nurturing customers is often a responsibility that no one in the organization really owns. Assign customer follow-ups to automation. Send automated thank-you messages, wish customers well on special occasions, perform frequent product health checks, and seek out feedback. Keep in touch with customers and make them feel seen and heard long after they become paying customers. Trigger automated notifications to both sales reps and customers to ensure timely renewals.

Sales automation: Where humans and machines work together to achieve success

With sales automation to replace repetitive human work, it frees up time and effort for humans that can be better used to focus on building strategies, planning for growth, and acting on insights. Automation isn't to be feared; if anything, it complements human work to give you a competitive edge—hyper-personalization and enhanced communication at scale. Automation strengthens internal and external collaboration and maximizes its potential.

With gen AI capabilities complementing automation, your CRM data offers endless possibilities; you can create models for targeted lead generation and nurturing, develop industry-specific sales and support models, perform in-depth data analysis, generate forecasts and predictions, and enrich your data further.