Should you let the tools do your job?
Of course, you should! Speaking from personal experience, as I’ve started my first sales gig doing it “old school”, I had to do tons of research on potential leads, allocate, categorize, and schedule them properly so that I could close a few deals on sales calls after having spent the majority of my time doing mundane, but still necessary, work. And that’s just the thing, whether you find that part of working as a salesperson to be terribly tedious or outstandingly interesting, we can all agree that it is very time-consuming.
According to Hubspot, salespeople spend more than half of their time doing administrative work instead of what is stated in their job title, selling products or services. Now, this number is never really going to reach zero, but sales automation can definitely help reallocate a few hours of your busy schedule to closing a few more deals and it can be done on many fronts. Be it prospecting and keeping up with industry-specific trends, scheduling meetings, creating a mass email outreach to potential clients, or creating reports, an abundance of sales automation software can help you with this.
Implementing Sales Automation Tools
If you’re planning on implementing automated email sequences in your sales process, Mailshake is an excellent platform to use, whether you’re interested in doing mass outreach, or a more delicate, personalized approach to potential clients. It also monitors the open rates of your emails, so that you can turn cold leads into warm ones, and also monitor the overall success of your email campaigns.
Scheduling appointments can be a breeze with good old Calendly, a reliable platform used to coordinate, connect, and nurture relationships all in one meeting lifecycle platform. Calendly has been around for the better part of the last decade, but in the past year or so has experienced a large surge in revenue, which serves as a testament to their quality.
Choosing the right CRM software
And for the all-rounder of sales automation software: the customer relationship manager or CRM. This category of software is, by far, the most versatile one. In many cases, they already have included what I previously mentioned and recommended all the while making cross-department handovers much easier (I’m talking about marketing to sales, sales to service handovers, of course). This is why it’s so tricky to recommend a specific CRM and it would require a whole separate article to discuss this topic. To not get into too many details, I’ll specify the size of your business as a determining factor in which CRM you should use.
If you’re a one-man show, or a small company numbering 10-15 people, Agile CRM is a great choice as it offers a lot of automation for a rather small price. Going up towards mid-sized businesses, CRMs like Zoho and Salesforce are always a safe pick, and you can get a lot out of using them. One thing to keep in mind is scalability, and there is no better CRM for fast scaling businesses than Hubspot. Since it’s everyone’s goal to make their business grow, a sudden rise in client interactions can be dealt with easily with this robust and feature-rich CRM.
So, will the machines take over?
As I’ve brazenly asked about the human factor and the role it plays in the sales process, I’d like to come back to that, now that I’ve explained the amazing things sales process automation tools bring to the field. And that’s just it, isn’t it? They can be considered simple tools, just like a regular hammer. In the wrong hands, it will cause nothing but damage, but in the right hands, it can build wonderful things.
The same goes for automation software. In fact, one common mistake emerging businesses make is that they commit to too many SaaS platforms at the start, be it for automation processes or other reasons, and it starts to cause financial and organizational problems within the company. Regardless of how much automation you implement in your daily tasks, it comes down to you and your skills as a salesperson to be that deal-closing machine that automation software can’t replace.
If you need some pointers about improving your skills as a salesperson take a look at one of our previous blog posts about that specifically.
Reading about sales automation tools is a great first step, but if you're unsure where to start, reach out to our team today. We are a team of trained sales professionals, who can help you define what tools suit your business, then integrate and utilize them for maximum success.
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