Good news! You have leftover sales budget from 2021. This is a perfect opportunity to help your team gear up for the new year and gain an advantage heading into 2022. But how? One vital way to utilize your leftover budget is through sales automation solutions that can help you shorten the sales cycle.
Automated processes can allow your team to focus more of their efforts on growing sales, possibly making 2022 your best sales year yet! Read on for some helpful ways automation can increase your competitive sales edge while ensuring you make the most of your resources.
1. Automate tedious repetitive tasks
As you may already know, in sales there are many time-consuming and repetitive tasks that can negatively impact your team’s efficiency and productivity. But you might not know the extent of it; on average, your team could be spending 3 hours per day or more on mundane tasks that are not part of their primary job. This time could be better used to focus on increasing sales and building stronger relationships with prospective clients.
Your Sales team likely has several software applications in their sales tech stack including customer relationship management (CRM), but the challenge is keeping data updated consistently across all platforms.
Sales automation solutions can help ensure that your systems are automatically fed information from web forms, email, chat, and other sources of data.
Additionally, you can ensure the various softwares, apps, and tools your team uses on a daily basis work together with automated integrations. With organizations worldwide using an average of 110 softwares in their day-to-day, having a way to connect these tools allows for a seamless experience and increased functionality.
Additionally, lead generation data is constantly flowing in from online and offline sources. Manually reformatting and correcting lead data can be a challenge to keep up with in real-time. Sales automation solutions like our Sales Data & List Management Wrkflows can keep your lead lists fresh and merge existing contacts to avoid duplication of contacts in your CRM.
Your leads also need to be nurtured. Our automated Lead Nurturing Wrkflows can guide leads through your conversion funnel with ease, optimize communication, personalize messaging, and shorten the sales cycle. In turn, this allows your Sales team to optimize their time by focussing on leads that are closest to conversion.
2. Simplify pipeline management
When moving potential customers through the sales pipeline, you’ll want to focus your efforts on the most qualified leads. Sales automation can help you from the very beginning of the process with automated lead generation, allowing you to reach the right decision-makers through tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Crunchbase.
What's more, automation streamlines the lead qualification process by using your own existing lead scoring model or by creating custom criteria based on collected data.
This can help your team avoid wasting time on chasing dead-end leads and move higher priority prospects through the sales funnel. It can also eliminate repetitive CRM tasks such as processing deals.
3. Create sales presentations and reports
To close a deal, you need to have a "wow" factor. This is often achieved through sales presentations and reports that are personalized and tailored exclusively to your prospective clients, and which highlight the advantages of your products and services over your competitor's.
However, while your team can spend a significant amount of time on creating presentations and compiling data to impress a potential buyer, automated sales solutions can take over that job by creating presentations using your prospect’s data and branding, helping your team shorten the sales cycle. Your team can therefore spend more time familiarizing themselves with your prospect, their needs, and their pain points and less time on creating a sales deck. After all, offering a personalized experience for prospective clients is now more important than ever. Reports show that personalization in sales and marketing efforts can increase conversion rates, customer acquisition, and even customer engagement.
4. Easily develop quotes and proposals
Automation can also help with custom proposal development to meet the specific needs of each potential customer, which is just one of several sales processes that can be handled by sales automation solutions.
Automation can minimize the back-and-forth between your team and prospects during the contract creation and approval processes. It can also help you onboard clients faster and increase consistency.
Our automated Quote and Proposal Development Wrkflows can automate the tasks of creating proposals and building custom quotes, thereby helping your team close the sale quicker.
5. Aid in post-sales activities
Sales automation doesn't stop being useful once the sale is made. There's always an opportunity to earn repeat customers and increase the value of the transaction through automated up-selling and cross-selling. This can be achieved through identifying other products and services the customer will most likely be interested in that will also enhance their experience.
Meanwhile, automation can monitor metrics like website visits and marketing email click-throughs to flag the best opportunities to reach out to existing customers. This helps to build brand loyalty and continue to drive higher sales into the future.
Use your leftover sales budget to your advantage
It's easy to see how sales automation can help streamline sales operations and planning, prepare a sales budget, create automated lead generation, and ultimately shorten the sales cycle allowing your Sales team to excel even more.
When you're considering what to do with your leftover sales budget, consider sales automation solutions that can eliminate repetitive tasks while also helping your team qualify the best leads—and make bigger deals.
Visit our Sales hub for more information on how automation can help you finish the year on a high note and position your organization for success in the new year!
Featured image: Mclittlestock
