Let's face it — closing deals can sometimes feel like a challenge. Only 69% of sales leaders trust that their reps can handle various sales scenarios successfully. Additionally, reps spend most of their time on dull tasks that aren't even sales-related.
Luckily, sales process automation saves the day. By using technology to automate the repetitive parts of the sales process, your reps can be relieved from the daily grind and instead focus their energy on revenue-generating activities. You'll also be better equipped to create a winning sales process that drives revenue.
This article explains what sales process automation is and how it can benefit your team and your organization.
Understanding the Sales Process
The sales process is the steps you develop to guide your reps in identifying and engaging prospects and eventually turning them into customers.
While the exact steps you take with each lead will vary based on your industry and customers, most sales processes involve prospecting, preparation, approach, presentation, handling objections, and closing. Let's unpack each step a bit further:
- Prospecting: This step involves finding and analyzing possible prospects. These are people who could be potential customers for your organization based on specific metrics or qualifying traits.
- Preparing: During this stage of the process, research the prospects identified in the previous step to get to know them better. This way, you increase your chances of building a relationship with them.
- Approaching: Once you understand who your prospects are, contact them one by one. Though it may seem easier to mass-email your prospect list, resist the temptation — B2B buyers generally respond better to tailored outreach efforts.
- Presenting: Now, it's time to showcase your product or service's value. Once again, customizability is the name of the game. In this step, prioritize your prospect's needs with a personalized sales pitch.
- Handling objections: During or after a sales call or demonstration, you'll likely need to deal with your prospects' objections. Doing so tactfully is an art that requires anticipating and addressing objections.
- Closing: This is when the prospect officially becomes a customer. Even though you're reaching the end of the sales funnel, there's little room for error at this stage.
- Following up: The sales process should continue even after the deal has been signed. Check on your new customers to ensure their needs are being met. Happy customers will likely stay longer, and lower churn rates are essential for revenue growth.
While a clear and well-defined sales process empowers your reps to sell effectively, an inefficient one can drain your profits.
Today, sales reps only spend two hours of their workday actively selling. Tedious but necessary tasks like administrative work, internal meetings, and database updates fill the rest of their schedules. Beyond leaving your sales team frustrated, this disproportionate use of time can hamper business results and lead to lost opportunities. Plus, people make mistakes — while this is part of our human nature, it is also costly.
Imagine if your team was alleviated from the burden of paperwork. Imagine if all your reps could focus on closing deals and nurturing customers. Think about how much time could be saved if practically all data entries were error-free. What may seem like a distant dream becomes a reality with sales process automation.
Understanding Sales Process Automation
At the most basic level, sales process automation involves using technology and software to make repetitive sales process tasks quicker and more efficient.
With this powerful tool, tasks like data entry, follow-up emails, lead scoring, and reporting can all be automated. Rather than being performed manually, these tasks are completed via artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA).
During the prospecting stage, automated systems can identify and score possible leads by scanning websites, social media, and various sources. Once the deal has been closed, automated reminders can help reps sales keep the ball rolling with follow-ups. Optimizing operations with this technology can also include:
- Data entry: These technologies can automatically capture and update customer data, eliminating the need for your team members to do this themselves.
- Email automation: With email sequences triggered by specific timelines or actions, you can ensure punctual and personalized communications with prospects. These tools send the right message at the right time.
- Reporting: These systems can create real-time reports and insights, enabling sales managers and RevOps teams to make data-backed decisions.
However, some tasks still need a human touch — these will still be managed by your sales team. By leveraging sales automation platforms like Clari, sales reps will have more time to prioritize high-value activities that generate revenue. These technologies can ensure a consistent, winning sales process, ultimately equipping your team to perform at their highest level.
The Benefits of Sales Process Automation
If you want to achieve sustainable business growth, automating your sales process is more than a nice-to-have — it's nonnegotiable. Here are all the benefits of sales automation:
- Increased productivity: Approximately one-third of all sales tasks can be automated, freeing up a significant amount of your team's time. As a result, your reps will likely enjoy improved sales productivity as their efforts and energy are refocused on strategic conversations.
- Enhanced scalability: With a growing business comes a higher volume of leads — handling these manually just isn't practical. At least not if you want to maintain responsiveness and personalization. By automating specific steps involved in the sales process, businesses can expand while boosting operational efficiency.
- Better customer engagement: With automation tools, you can effortlessly observe and record the behavior of your customers and leads as they interact with your organization. These tools then use this behavior to tailor interactions, leading to higher conversation rates and customer engagement.
- Accessible data: Along with providing up-to-date insights and analytics, these systems gather all this data in one convenient location. Sales and RevOps teams can instantly find what they need, saying goodbye to lengthy manual searches. As automation also increases data accuracy, forecasting accuracy will improve.
- Fewer errors: Team members likely experience fatigue or boredom when they complete repetitive tasks. As a result, they might be prone to distraction, which can lead to mistakes. Sales automation software can perform these tasks much more quickly while reducing the number of errors.
The bottom line is that sales process automation is necessary to maintain efficiency, effectiveness, and competitiveness, whatever the size of your pipeline. All of this eventually increases sales as you convert more leads, even though your team is performing less manual work.
Sound too good to be true? The results speak for themselves.
With Clari, our clients report that their win rates have increased by 10%. There is also an 80% reduction in time spent on manual data entry, giving sales reps more time to meet their quotas. With more accurate data, revenue orchestration teams can create better forecasts in only 10% of the time. Plus, by lowering churn risks with better engagement, revenue leaks are reduced by 5% to 10%.
How to Implement Sales Process Automation
As sales automation processes can help you transform your total revenue, implementing these systems is a strategic decision. But before jumping in head first, carefully consider how you plan to use these tools.
Follow these steps to get started with sales process automation.
1. Identify Areas for Automation
Determine which sales process stages would benefit most from automation, giving you the highest return on your investment. If you don't have a well-defined sales process, map this out first.
With the steps of your process in mind, speak to sales reps about which tasks they feel swallow up most of their time. Once you understand the repetitive tasks that get in the way of selling, research various platforms and tools that meet your team's and your company's needs.
2. Select the Right Tool
When doing your research, keep an eye out for the following features:
- Contact management.
- Lead tracking and scoring.
- Email campaign automation.
- Task and workflow automation.
- Sales forecasting and reporting.
- Conversational AI.
While the platform you select should include the above components, the only way to know if a tool is suitable is to use it. We offer free demos so you can see Clari in action before committing.
3. Train Your Team
Even the most suitable platform can only drive the desired results if used efficiently.
Provide practical training so your team knows how to make the most of these tools. Start slowly with the essentials before moving on to more advanced features to gradually build proficiency.
4. Review and Adjust
Schedule frequent reviews to ensure your automation tools continue to impact your team and company positively.
With the valuable insights gained from both performance data and employee feedback, you can adjust your processes as necessary.
Automate Your Sales Process With Clari
As the only unified platform created to run revenue, Clari is an industry leader in sales automation. If you want better sales engagement or to boost your forecasting capabilities, we have the right tools to help drive your organization forward.
With Clari's platform's cutting-edge AI capabilities and user-friendly interface, your reps can achieve more while doing less. To explore how AI-driven sales automation can empower your team, take the product tour today.
