3 Things You Can Improve With Sales Automation Workflows

 

64% of a salesperson’s time is spent on non-selling tasks on average. That’s a lot of time doing simple, repetitive tasks that don’t result in revenue.

If you want to maximize productivity in your sales team and want them to spend more time selling and closing deals, then you can’t ignore sales automation and workflow setups.

We’ll show you how to create automated workflows to jack up your sales pipeline and easily go from leads to deals.

What Does an Automation Workflow Do?

An automation workflow identifies what data gets moved, what activities get done in what order, and what the trigger for these actions will be.

When a customer interacts with your website or product, your automation software picks up their digital footprint. It processes the information in a set pattern, customized by you for your specific sales funnel.

Let’s look at how you can automate simple sales tasks and create workflows, regardless of the size of your business, scope, or budget:

1. Email Management

On average, most salespeople receive 20–80 emails a day. If you’re constantly on the move, with multiple prospects to reach out to, meetings to schedule, and follow-ups to make, this can be a herculean task.

The good news?

Email workflows and templates can turn this daily burden into a cake-walk. Let’s look at four areas where automation can help with your email.

Personalization

By personalizing just 20% of the content in your emails, you can increase your open rates by 40% and your CTRs by 112%.

Your customers are more than just numbers, though. You can’t treat them like metrics and expect to close deals. If your emails aren’t personalized, they’ll likely end up in the trash

So before you reach out to anyone, you need to understand what motivates them. What are their interests? What problem are you solving for them? And why are you the one to solve them?

By using this information in your emails, you can quickly stand out from the crowd and build engagement.

Easy, right? There’s just one problem.

Research and personal touches take time. You need to be able to personalize at scale. And that’s where automation can help.

By automating most of the common, everyday emails you send, you have more time to give a little personalization to all of them. This works on:

  • Welcome emails to new prospects
  • Follow-up emails
  • Schedule-a-demo emails
  • Meeting-reminder emails
  • Thank-you emails to new customers

Granted, it might feel like overkill. I mean, how much time does it take, really, to write a welcome email? But you need to think long-term. If you re-write that email 100 times in a month, how much time can you save using a template?

A lot. So it’s worth whatever time it takes to set it up.

A/B testing

A/B testing will help you understand what content works better for your niche. It also gives you data that you can’t when you individually handle each email.

With that data, you’ll be able to figure out what motivates your customers to reply, so you can optimize your content workflows even more.

Bottom line, that’s going to improve your win rates and help you become a top performer.

Your CRM

Your CRM can automatically populate important contact details while you are setting up your workflows. Since most of your prospect’s data is already in your inbox, connecting your inbox with your CRM, an email tool like Mailchimp or a sales engagement tool like Outreach is a no-brainer.

You’ll be able to create handy workflows and sequences that make it easy to send personalized, fast, and accurate emails — saving you time while helping you hit your targets.

Follow up reminders

This is another way to use automation for email and outreach. Most sales deals require up to five follow-ups (sometimes over months) to close.

But what if your lead falls through the cracks and you forget to follow up? All the work you’ve done up till then could be wasted.

With automated workflows and reminders, you essentially have a safety net in place that protects your prospects from being forgotten.

2. Pipeline Management

Of all your leads, only about 25% will be sales qualified and ready-to-pitch. That’s why it’s so important to manage your sales pipeline for forecasting and to qualify your leads. Unfortunately, it’s rarely easy.

With automation and workflows, you can reduce effort by over 50% and be even more effective at closing deals. Here are two ways to do just that.

Automating your lead generation process

By automating your lead gen, you know that when a lead enters your CRM, it’s kept warm via a series of touch-points.

Start by leveraging your CRM — along with plugins, integrations, and tools — to make sure all of your lead’s information is fed into it directly.

Using LinkedIn Matched Audiences, you can find potential prospects with similar interests and patterns to your current prospects and customers. This will allow you to find and target people based on their skill set, company, or designation.

Retargeting is another important way of reaching out to landing page visitors and contacts based on their behavior on your website or around the internet.

You can do the same with a Facebook lead-gen campaign, adding leads directly to your sales funnel, then following up with email templates as we discussed above.

Google forms can be used to conduct surveys or gather feedback from leads that don’t close. The information you learn from surveys can help you optimize your funnel and add more data to your CRM for intelligent data insights.

Best of all, you can integrate most of these tools with your CRM to make sure all the leads captured are immediately put into your funnel.

Lead Distribution and Enrichment Tools

Tools like Clearbit, Ampliz, or Leandata ensure that your leads are reached on time, with the right reps assigned to them, and with the right triggers to lead to an outcome-based sales strategy.

Most of these intelligent sales tools are designed to keep your sales pipeline filled with quality contact info and all the relevant details and data insights.

Once your pipeline has been enriched with quality leads and automated workflows, you can easily assign them to your sales reps and keep an eye on each lead’s journey and outcome using the dashboards in your CRM.

3. Reporting

About half, or 52%, of sales companies waste valuable time going through old, inconsistent data spread across multiple databases. We are talking about hours of manual work doing redundant tasks like data entry.

What’s worse, it’s highly probable the numbers they fetch from this old data won’t be 100% accurate.

This is one major challenge that can be easily solved using a CRM.

CRM Reporting

Modern CRMs make it easy to automate your reporting. This allows your sales reps to focus more of their time on selling and networking, rather than doing manual data-entry tasks.

To do this you need to identify your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) using metrics like calls-made, deals-closed, demos-booked, meetings-attended, etc.

Most CRMs today allow you to create custom dashboards using these identified metrics, and these reports can be easily downloaded or shared with all your team members on demand.

Data Visualization

About 93% of all human interaction is visual. Our brain can process images up to 60,000 times faster than it does text. As such, it makes no sense to represent complex data with lengthy, text-heavy reports.

With customized dashboards and workflows, it’s possible to turn the data on your dashboard into easy-to-digest graphics and visualizations so your team can keep close tabs on your sales funnel easily and quickly.

Workflow management and integration apps, like Zapier or Automate.io, allow you to connect your CRM with Google Sheets, Facebook Lead Ads, Mailchimp, and so many others, so all of your company’s data is in one easy-to-read dashboard.

You can also connect your CRM with communication tools like Slack or Gmail to get real-time notifications when you close a deal or if you haven’t heard from a prospect in some time, making sure that a lead never falls through the cracks.

To Wrap Up

With automation workflows in place, the world is your playground!

It’s the time to make the most of your networking and rapport building capabilities to convert your leads into deals by allowing automation and technology to do everything else.

If you’re struggling with sales or marketing automation and need some guidance, feel free to drop us a line.

Till then, automate everything!

Ashok is the CEO of Automate.io, a SaaS app integration platform based in San Francisco with over a thousand customers across the globe. He has over 10 years of entrepreneurial experience in enterprise / SaaS application space.

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