How to Automate your Sales Process

Remember the 90’s? Never received a notification, barely even touched a computer. Wired telephones and face-to-face meetings with overhead projectors. 

Now look at us, we’ve come so far. We are staring into (three) screens, streaming (90’s) tunes on the iPhone (with three cameras), and writing an article about how technology can make your job easier; which is available to people (billions) at the click of a button. Are we at our technological peak? No, but we’re higher up the technological mountain than ever.

Sales teams needn’t dread the working day anymore. Technology has come so far that they don’t need to painstakingly enter data into a spreadsheet, browse user accounts for activity, or sit by the phone; waiting for it to ring. 

Sales automation is something that helps salespeople.

At NetHunt CRM, we analyzed processes that are mostly automated by sales teams. If you still do any of the listed below processes manually, don't even walk...run to automate them :)

Automatic Sales Process No1: Lead Generation

Lead generation is the process of getting people in your sales pipeline to sell to.

To automate outbound lead generation, you may use a CRM or cold outreach tool to set up personalized email campaigns and set up automated email sequences to nurture leads until they are sales-ready. You may also automate lead generation on LinkedIn by adding person's or company's profile in one click to a CRM already enriched with available data from LinkedIn.  

To automate inbound lead generation, you may use web forms that will automatically store leads to your database adding data from web forms. Afterwards, you can qualify those leads, set up automated nurturing sequences and automatically create tasks for managers.

Automatic Sales Process No2: Email Sequence Lead Nurturing

Email lead nurturing involves establishing a strong relationship between a brand and its consumers through email. They can occur at each pipeline stage, and email sequences enrich the buying journey for both sides of a transaction. 

Email sequence lead nurturing doesn’t just work in terms of sales, but it also increases email open rates, keeps you fresh in a prospect’s mind, provides instant results for prospects, and opens up an opportunity to inform and entertain leads. They’re win-win.

Setting drip campaigns is as easy as it sounds. After our inbound lead enters the pipeline, an email is immediately sent. It welcomes them to the crew, tells them you’re absolutely always here for them, and sews the idea of getting a product demo booked in. And then you wait for three days, to give your prospect some breathing space.

After three days another email is sent in your drip campaign. Obviously it can say whatever you want it to, but we chose to invite our participants to talk to us about our product. 

Automatic Sales Process No3: Moving a lead to the next stage in your pipeline.

Once your automated sales process gains traction, your sales velocity increases, and we can start moving our prospects and leads through the pipeline based on their behaviour. Let's say they answer one of your emails in a sequence, you set it up as a trigger to change the stage of the leads. You don't want them to send another automated email. Instead, you want to take it under control and continue to send hyper-relevant emails manually. 

You can come up with various triggers like you've received money from the lead, and you automatically move the lead to the stage 'Won'. 

Automatic Sales Process No4: Tasks creation.

You may want somebody from your sales team to take action on a certain pipeline change. Once the lead moves to the 'Prepare Quote' stage, you may create a pre-defined set of tasks for a manager: prepare the quote, contact the finance department, etc. Another example is when a lead moved to 'Won' stage, you may create a task to send them an email in a month to find out how things are going. 

Automatic Sales Process No5: Post-Sale Automation.

Once the lead is won, your sales automation may not come to its end. Post-sale automated workflows can strengthen customer relations, increasing LTV and retention.

You may set up an automated customer satisfaction survey to send to a client in a month after their first payment. Another thing you can automate is setting up a follow-up email if you see a low activity from a customer. A good work of your Customer Success team will be setting up automatically assessment calls with a client to see if they meet their initial expectations after the purchase.

So many processes can be automated, saving precious time of salespeople, protecting them from manual errors and freeing up time for activities that have higher impact on ROI. All those workflows are just limited by your imagination...and the tools you choose to accompany you. So, choose the sales automation tools wisely.