In recent years, some of the great time-saving advancements being made in the work environment are in sales automation. We’ll chat about what that is in a second, but first, here’s why you might need it.
You need sales automation if you…
- Ever forget to chase up a lead
- Spend hours inputting prospect contact details into your CRM
- Ever neglect a customer issue for a too long a period of time
- You tend to forget previous conversations with clients
- You spend ages trying to arrange a client meeting
Any of these ring a bell? Then sales automation could improve both your efficiency and your profitability, particularly with strategies such as account-based marketing, inbound marketing and outbound marketing.
So what is sales automation?
Sales automation takes time-consuming, manual activities that all sales reps and managers are familiar with and automates them into click-of-a-button tasks. This makes your team and business more efficient and minimises the potential for human error.
Let’s see how sales automation can help for both reps and managers.
How sales automation can help
1. Attracts more leads
If you have a LinkedIn Premium account, you can set up a custom filter using your combination of criteria, such as “CMO AND London”. This means you don’t have to continually run the same searches every time.
You can also set up email alerts every day, week or month, depending on how many prospects you need. This will give you a prequalified list of prospects with none of the manual labour. In case you were wondering, LinkedIn only sends you new profiles, so don’t worry about repeatedly seeing the same names.
Using an insights tool that lives in your email will also free up time. The Inbox Profiles tool in HubSpot Sales pulls details from your prospect’s CRM records, social media profiles and company so you have access to all you need to send them a highly personalised email. With this centralised hub, there’s no need to have dozens of tabs open to find out their job title, what they tweet about or the last page they converted on.
2. Attracts better leads
With lead enrichment tools, you can gather information from a multitude of sources to paint a detailed, up-to-date picture of your prospect. This isn’t easy; there are lots of companies competing for prospects’ attention so you’ve got to find a way to cut through the noise and appeal directly to their sensibilities.
Thankfully, HubSpot Marketing offers lots of lead generating and enrichment tools that allow you to capture, store and nurture leads, such as:
- Forms
- Pop-up forms
- Chatbots
- Live chat (with a real-life human)
- Follow-up emails (from form submissions)
These tools integrate easily into whichever CRM you’re using (HubSpot or otherwise), help you capture leads and then nurture them with automated follow-ups.
Sales automation takes manual activities and turns them into click-of-a-button tasks.
3. HubSpot sales sequences
So, you put on an event, loads of people turned up and you gathered lots of contact data for follow-up discussions. Congrats, you’ve just filled the top of your sales funnel.
At this point, your leads are far from being over the finish line. You’ll need to follow up those initial conversations made at your event (a coffee morning, a presentation, a webinar).
Obviously, this is where a well-kept CRM comes in, added to and updated by your working-as-one sales and marketing teams.
But this still takes time and effort, so you need a way to keep the follow-up conversation flowing with the minimum of fuss. This is where HubSpot sales sequences can help. Sequences automate your sales outreach and keep your interactions personal at all stages of the sales process.
Create and edit HubSpot sales sequences
With the sequences tool, you can send a series of targeted, timed email templates to nurture contacts over time. When contacts reply to the email or book a meeting, they’ll automatically unenroll from the sequence.
Sequences use a mix of
HubSpot sales sequences help you compress your lead-to-conversion timeframe, so you can reach more people with less effort and ensure those leads don’t go cold. To make it even easier, HubSpot’s sequencing templates offer you a series of pre-written examples to use depending on the situation:
So, for a recent trade show follow-up, you may have had a chinwag with a marketing director for an exciting new start-up your company can service. However, they haven’t followed up on your free 30-minute consultation offer. With HubSpot sales sequences, you can easily reach out to them with a pre-written – yet still personalised – template.
HubSpot sequences allow for automation, too, so you can set parameters to send follow-up email after a set amount of days:
Learn how to set up a HubSpot sequence here.
HubSpot sequence queues
Sequences automate your sales outreach and keep your interactions personal at all stages of the sales process. You can enrol a single contact or multiple contacts using the sequence queues feature.
With sequence queues, you can add your contacts to a queue and enrol them in a sequence whilst still being able to personalise the content for each individual.
A quick disclaimer – sequence queues are available for Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise users only.
Learn how to set up a HubSpot sequence queue here.
What happens at trade shows shouldn’t stay at trade shows
Going to trade shows means interacting with potentially hundreds of people. You’ll exchange business cards, email addresses and promises to get back in touch. You might even form solid friendships whilst you’re there – hitting up the bar, tipping back a few tequilas, swapping old war (marketing) stories. But once the trade show is done, too often those relationships fizzle out and go cold.
But through HubSpot sales sequences, you can easily keep the magic alive with simple, personalised and automated follow-ups. These sequences keep the conversation going, reduce the time and effort you spend chasing leads and shorten the sales process from prospect to convert.
4. Meeting scheduling
Scheduling a meeting with a prospect can be a real back-and-forth affair, which is a real momentum-killer and can cause the lead to go cold. But with HubSpot Meetings, you can follow up whilst the iron is hot by sending a link of your schedule to the prospect. They’ll see all the available times and select the ones that work for both you and them. At the same time, HubSpot Meetings also creates a record for this contact in your CRM when they select the time they want
5. Creating proposals
No longer do you need to draft a proposal or quote by copying and pasting the relevant details from your emails, notes and CRM. Instead, tools like PandaDoc integrate with your CRM, so that when you create a quote, key details like customer information, product details and pricing are automatically transferred.
You can usually set up timed reminders, too. That way, you won’t have to pester prospects to sign – your tool will do it for you.
Want to make sure your manager or legal team review the contract first? Set up an automated internal workflow so the right stakeholders can sign off before it’s sent to the buyer.
6. Lead scoring
Want to keep your reps hyper-focused on the best opportunities? Use an automated lead scoring system. Lead scoring software uses demographic and behavioural data to determine how qualified a lead is, so salespeople know exactly which prospects to prioritise.
This is a really useful tool, but check you have a sufficient amount of leads to score in the first place. If your sales team is asking for more leads, then focus on lead generation instead of scoring. But if your team is busy then you’ll find efficiencies by scoring your leads by the likelihood of success.
Having the right information to hand here is critical. From lead capture forms to online behaviour, email to social engagement, there are lots of ways to gather this data. And, as ever on the battleground of business, knowledge is power – the more of it you have, the better your chances of creating meaningful, personalised connections with your prospects.
So, there you have it, six ways sales automation can boost your business. With the increased efficiencies sales automation software brings, you can fit much more into your day. Or work less and then put your feet up by mid-afternoon. Whatever works for you…
Want to know more? Contact Woven to see how we can boost your business and save you time with sales automation.