Sales automation is a method of using technology to automate repetitive tasks (such as responding to emails!). Sales automation is something that more and more businesses are turning to as they realize the time (and money) saving benefits of automating tasks that don’t require constant human interaction.
Sales automation tools make it easy to automatically respond to inquiries and follow up on leads, manage your sales pipeline, train new employees, and send invoices and payment reminders.
Sales automation can be used alongside marketing automation to convert your audience into customers and is one of the best techniques for scaling your business.
How Automation Helps to Facilitate Your Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is the process that takes a potential customer from the point of initial contact to the decision to make a purchase.
Where traditionally you might be used to taking a prospective lead by the hand and personally guiding them through the sales funnel by doing things like typing out personalized emails, figuring out when to upsell, and responding to individual queries, when you use a sales automation platform you free yourself (and your employees) from having to do all the legwork.
A sales automation platform guides your leads through your sales funnel and helps you to accumulate wins over time, building the momentum that your business needs in order to keep growing.
How Sales Automation Works
The first step in a sales funnel is getting your target audience interested in your brand, and getting their contact info. A great way to do this is to offer a lead magnet, which is a free service or product that you can provide in exchange for their email address. Your lead magnet should have something to do with your company, so that you are attracting future customers. With sales automation, prospects enter their information on a contact form on a landing page in order to access the free content.
Once you have leads in your sales funnel, you can set up an automated email nurture series that sends emails at regular intervals to your prospects. The key here is to avoid trying to force a sale, and instead focus on sharing information and educating your leads about what you have to offer.
Your final email in the nurture series should be the hard sell, which is when you can offer a special promo deal or discount, product demonstration, or free consultation to seal the deal. Not every prospect will respond to a hard sell, and that’s totally ok. Think back to the last time you wanted to purchase something for yourself and you knew you would eventually make the purchase, but it just wasn’t the right time.
For those leads who don’t respond right away to the hard sell, you can always create a separate nurture series designed just for future conversions and make the offer again in six months.
Sales Automation for Small Businesses
If you run a small business, a sales automation program is especially helpful for establishing a scalable foundation that can support your long-term growth goals.
A sales automation program manages your sales funnel and email campaigns, and can help to organize your daily tasks so that you and your employees can focus on the bigger picture. It can also:
Record Contacts
A sales automation program can serve to safely record and keep track of contact info in an easily accessible format.
Keeps You Connected
Sales automation helps to keep you connected to your audience through customizable email sequences.
You can also create automated responses to keep customers from feeling neglected when they try to contact you or your team outside of business hours, as well as automatic text message reminders of appointment information and times.
Sales automation programs can come with a library of email templates that you can choose from and customize in order to target specific audiences.
Streamlines Appointments
An appointment and meeting scheduler makes it easy to keep everything organized and everyone on the same page.
Analyzes Sales Trends
Automated sales analysis gives you an idea of how many people are completing your forms, opening your emails, and clicking through your ads. It can show you how well your sales funnel is working to convert leads, and give you an idea of where you need to make any tweaks or improvements. You can also easily pull up revenue statistics, activity history, and order and billing information.
Makes Payments Easy
Automated payments and invoicing makes it easy to accept credit card payments, send invoices, and keep track of who has paid you and if anyone still owes. Automatic reminders are a friendly way to increase payment rates without having to get involved with bill collecting.
Combining Sales Automation With a CRM
A CRM is a Customer Relationship Management platform that does what the name implies: manages customer relationships! While sales automation and CRM technology often overlap, both are designed to do specific things. When you combine sales automation with a CRM, you get the best of both worlds.
A CRM is a system that keeps track of the information you need to know about your customers in order to provide the best possible products and services. You should process all leads through your CRM, which will enable you to easily see where you have bottlenecks and how to warm up cold leads.
If you’re ready to start using the best CRM and sales automation tools in the market, then we’re here to help. At Don Creative Group we pride ourselves on discovering, testing, and implementing cutting edge technology to help you streamline your sales processes and start growing your business exponentially.
Our sales automation and CRM tools allow you to build email nurture series based on the actions your prospects take, create quick-loading landing pages that are functional and attractive, streamline your sales pipeline, create custom quotes, and easily integrate with tools like Shopify, WooCommerce, Quickbooks, and other third-party productivity systems.
Ready to take your business to the next level? Contact us today to learn more about how sales automation can work for you!
