Eight Ways of Outbound Sales Automation

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There are many aspects of the outbound sales process (i.e., the process of generating and nurturing leads and closing sales) that need to be bespoke and personal. Especially as you edge towards closing a sale.

However, if you’re not automating processes that target prospects further down the funnel, you’re wasting valuable time.

Here are 8 ways you can automate your outbound sales and, at the same time, improve the efficiency and performance of your sales team.

Eight Ways to Automate Your Outbound Sales

1. Prospecting

Prospecting involves identifying potential leads and collecting information on them.

It’s historically been a long and labor-intensive process (or it was if you wanted to target prospects who were in any way qualified).

Today, that’s all changed.

The market is overflowing with solutions built to help companies streamline and scale the process of finding and qualifying prospects or automating it entirely.

  • Growbots has its own database of 180M+ worldwide contacts that you can slice and dice according to your ideal customer profile with the use of precise filters.
  • CrunchBase is a database of new and growing companies and their people. It offers an advanced search function that allows users to filter results according to a wide range of criteria.
  • LeadMine feels a little less sophisticated, but it does boast 200 million contacts and promises only to return email addresses that can be verified as being correct.
  • Accompany uses AI technology to help you find and connect with qualified prospects.

You can learn about more of the best ways to automate prospecting and the tools available right now here.

Seek, pick, and reach

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2. Sending Cold Emails and Follow-Ups

While in some instances, it makes sense to put the extra effort into writing a really personalized outreach email or follow-up, more often than not, your time would be better spent elsewhere.

If you’re not using templates in your cold outreach campaigns – along with a tool like Growbots that makes it easy to execute campaigns at scale and track their impact – you probably should be (and we’re not just saying that because Growbots is our tool).

Ideally, you should be scoring leads and using this data to decide how much time to invest in personalizing an email.

You can get away with sending prospects with very low scores emails that are 100% templated, but prospects with very high scores (indicating that they’re both well-qualified and about ready to buy) should be granted significantly more of your reps’ time and attention.

3. Lead Management

Lead management is the process of acquiring, tracking, and managing leads. It’s usually carried out using a CRM that monitors things like how far along in the sales process your leads are, who they’ve spoken to, and what’s been said.

This is important because it assists in lead prioritization and helps reps approach prospects in the right way and with the right information. It also helps assess staff performance, what’s working, and where changes need to be made.

Lagging behind and sticking with spreadsheets instead of upgrading to a CRM will, in short, have an impact on your bottom line – and not a positive one (not to mention the fact that you’ll be making life far more difficult for your staff than it needs to be).

4. Product Demonstrations

While there will be cases where demonstrating a product needs to happen over the phone or in person, earlier in the sales processes, you can do this using video.

  • WeVideo makes it really easy for novice filmmakers to capture, edit and share videos.
  • CamStudio is a free desktop recorder that’s ideal for making simple product demonstrations.
  • BombBomb makes email and video more impactful by sending your videos as your emails.

Try creating both very short (i.e., 30 seconds or less) videos for inclusion in cold outreach emails and longer videos (2 – 3 minutes) for sending to prospects who are engaging with you and have expressed an interest in learning more.

5. Answering FAQs

Salespeople shouldn’t be wasting time typing out a bespoke reply each time a prospect asks an FAQ; they should be making use of a text expansion tool instead.

This will allow sales teams to answer common questions or insert sentences they find themselves often saying, using just a few keystrokes (and it will ensure they avoid typos, too).

There’s a text expansion tool built into Mac computers (go to system preferences > keyboard > text), although it does have limitations.

Windows users don’t have a choice – you’ll need to shop elsewhere. Options include TextExpander and the free Auto Text Expander plugin for Chrome.

6. Scheduling Meetings

Odds are, your best sales reps schedule a lot of meetings – but are they scheduling them as quickly and efficiently as they could?

Meeting schedulers (like Calendly and Assistant.to) remove the need for back-and-forth when scheduling meetings. You simply select when you’re available and ask your prospects to do the same.

The tool will then automatically schedule the meeting at an appropriate time and even add it to your respective calendars.

This is the sort of thing that might not seem like a big deal, but in actual fact, those few minutes spent scheduling meetings really add up to the whole sales cycle and could be time better spent elsewhere.

Reach More with Less Effort

Connect with Potential Clients at scale

7. Managing social media

Have you SMM managers ever faced piles of work? Difficult to go through all messages and inquiries, create posts, and track all the metrics?

There is a solution to that that brings out the best in social media management and enhances your outbound marketing.

As soon as you involve management tools in your social media accounts, you are able to save a lot of precious time while streamlining the whole process.

Outbound sales automation software for social media can come with the help of such tools as Hootsuite or Buffer.

This way, you are able to track all the metrics, schedule posts in advance, monitor engagement rates, etc.

8. Involving sales engagement platforms

Still, doubting which way is the best? Do not know what would work best for your company?

No worries, we have got some dessert left. This way of outbound sales automation can just blow your mind when you find out how much it can boost your process.

Involving a sales engagement platform is a real game changer as it plays a crucial role in automating sales. Such a platform usually combines a few sales automation tools.

These tools can be prospecting, automated tracking, and follow-ups. What does it mean for you?

It means that your sales representatives can easily manage outreach campaigns, having various templates for cold emails, follow-ups, and voicemails.

Moreover, this platform allows them to automatically conduct all the sales calls and messages, track engagement rates, and send notifications to sales reps about whether anyone is interested or even ready to buy your products or services.

Don’t get over-surprised as such a platform also has features to manage and prioritize lead generation.

Amazing, don’t you think?

While this program takes care of such repetitive tasks, sales reps are able to focus on something more important, such as, e.g. closing deals.

Conclusions

Don’t want to be wasting your time on tasks that can be completely automated? And you shouldn’t. Especially when you are edging close to the sale.

This is why we have decided to round up 8 efficient ways to automate your outbound sales, and that will always have you covered.

We know you are busy so we have one last tip for you – if you really want to automate your business’ processes, you should also look into marketing automation. 

Maciej Skoczyński

Maciej Skoczyński

Account Executive Team Leader at Growbots

no prior experience & time required

Find your winning outbound formula with Concierge

no prior experience & time required

Find your winning outbound formula with Concierge

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