6 Tips to Streamline Your Sales Process With Automation Tools

Main Challenges of Sales Teams in 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on sales and productivity, resulting in both challenges and opportunities. Here are some of the ways the pandemic has changed sales and productivity:

Building Trust and Rapport Virtually With Prospects

One of the biggest changes brought on by the pandemic has been the widespread adoption of remote work. Sales teams have had to quickly adapt to working from home, which has resulted in new challenges and opportunities for sales productivity.

With this uptick in remote work, there has arrived an increased reliance on technology. With remote work and social distancing measures in place, communication and collaboration has all but vanished from the physical realm – Zoom and other virtual meeting platforms are the frontiers of online sales, marketing, and customer relationship management.

Scheduling Meetings With Decision Makers

Meetings are pretty much all online now. Businesses are still trying to figure out how to make Zoom meetings more productive.

Important decision makers (the people who will ultimately say yes or no to buying your product or service) are busy – getting even a few minutes with them in an online meeting is a struggle. A common thread here is that businesses need to figure out how to do more with less.

Improving Productivity

Work-from-home measures brought many jobs – and consumers – home. People rely more on ecommerce than ever before. Workers are spread out across the world – it’s hard to find the best times to meet that work with everyone’s schedule.

Maintaining Existing Prospects

Less face-to-face interaction means it’s harder to maintain relationships with current prospects. Travel restrictions and health concerns slowed down sales productivity, which just isn’t really done in person anymore.

What is a Sales Automation Process?

A sales automation process is a strategy to leverage the power of automation tools in order to improve and streamline your sales process. By setting up custom workflows to take care of repetitive, time-consuming tasks, human sales representatives freed up to be more efficient and productive.

6 Tips to Streamline Your Sales Process

If you want to stay competitive in this shifting, challenging business landscape, here are a few tips on how to leverage automation and other tools to improve your sales process:

Automate Prospecting And Lead Generation

Web forms, landing pages, and marketing automation software can help you efficiently identify and prioritize leads. Integrate these pages with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to manage and track leads.

Defining a target audience, creating a lead magnet, and consistent email and social media marketing assisted by automation will further help with lead prospecting.

Implement Workflows to Automate Manual Tasks

Lead generation, email followup, data entry, and appointment scheduling are all important yet time-consuming and monotonous tasks that can be completely eliminated from your workload, giving you more time to focus on nurturing and carrying your leads through the sales process.

Create a Lead Scoring System

A lead scoring system is a great way to quantify and rank your leads, allowing you to prioritize which leads are more likely to convert and identify which leads might need more nurturing.

You can automate this, too – whenever a lead takes a specific action, such as downloading a whitepaper or attending a webinar, the lead’s score will automatically update.

Automate Lead Assignment

Whenever a lead comes in – no matter the channel – it should automatically be assigned to an available sales rep, who ideally will set up the meeting as soon as possible. Dynamics 365 Sales Insights and QikChat offer this service.

Record Sales Calls

Every sales rep should take advantage of the virtual landscape we find ourselves in at the moment by recording their virtual sales calls.

There’s nothing to lose and everything to gain – all it takes is the press of a button on Zoom and you’ll save a recording of your meeting into the cloud. This way, if you forget any information about your lead or how they’re feeling, you can go back and see.

Use Meeting Scheduling Tools to Streamline the Sales Cycle

Scheduling meetings has been a hassle that has received a lot of attention in terms of streamlining. The process of trying to coordinate a time that works for both parties through back and forth emails is cumbersome and often results in losing momentum or dropping the opportunity.

When2Meet, YouCanBookMe, Calendly, and other scheduling tool alternatives offer useful features such as one-click appointment booking, simple availability setting, and compatibility with various calendar software.

Not Good, Not Better, Just Different

It’s up to individual businesses whether the shift to virtual sales and marketing process is a hindrance or not. There are certainly areas that are more challenging for startups now, but there are also a bevy of tools that can be leveraged to make the sales process better than it was before. Those that adapt and use these technologies to their advantage will stay afloat and find success.