Every sales team's goal is to close more deals and drive revenue. But to equip salespeople with the tools they need to achieve this goal, it's first important to identify and solve any challenges they might face. In this article, we're looking at common pain points that sales teams contend with and how automation can help, whether finding quality leads or freeing up precious time.

Finding the right leads

There's no question that it's easy to draw up a list of a hundred leads (or buy a list of leads online) and send out "cold call" emails. But if they aren't quality leads, your sales team wastes their time reaching out to prospects who were never interested in what you're selling. The alternative is to build and maintain a list of qualified leads. Still, as any sales rep will know, this takes significant time and effort.

The good news is that automation can support sales teams in the lead-generation process. For example, Wrkflows automatically imports contacts that engage with your brand on social media to your lead list, converts business cards collected at trade events into leads, and then enriches those leads with accurate data from LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and other sources. This helps keep lead lists full of promising, high-quality prospects.

Connecting with prospects

Even with a rich lead list, sales teams often experience another pain point: how to make deal-worthy connections with each prospect and stay on top of communication in a timely way. Unfortunately, too-slow responses or correspondence that slips through the cracks wastes many potential sales opportunities. Research has shown that sales teams that responded to leads within an hour were sixty times more likely to qualify them than those that waited 24 hours or more.

Ultimately, how quickly you connect with or respond to a prospect can be the difference between a lead conversion and a sale lost to a competitor. But we also understand that it's not feasible for salespeople to check and draft emails constantly. That's where automation comes in. Wrk's automation solution can generate personalized emails based on CRM data and how far along the conversion pipeline the lead is. It can also automate meeting scheduling and follow-ups so no lead is left in the cold.

Sales and marketing aren't aligned

Sales and marketing, or "smarketing," if you like, are two departments that benefit hugely from working in tandem to generate leads and then turn those leads into clients. Well-aligned sales and marketing teams work more efficiently because they share a common goal and strategy. However, even though most sales and marketing professionals agree that alignment can improve the customer experience, 90% say they need more alignment regarding strategy, process, content, and culture.

We could write a whole book about how automation helps keep sales and marketing teams aligned, but we'll sum it up briefly for the sake of concision. Automation solutions allow data from marketing and sales teams to be easily centralized and synced across different platforms so that the same data informs everyone's decisions. On top of that, automated reporting and market research can simplify cross-department meetings and ensure that everyone is on the same page when coming up with new campaign ideas or sales strategies.

Not enough time!

This is one we can all relate to. For sales teams, there is never enough time to connect with prospects or follow up on every lead. Repetitive but necessary tasks, like inputting lead information, seeking out client contact info, and drawing up proposals, can take up workday hours, limiting how much bandwidth your sales team has to put their skills to use selling your product or service.

Automation can't add more hours to the day in a literal sense, but it can give your sales reps more time for the higher-value parts of their job. Automation solutions like Wrk's can work behind the scenes to keep your CRM organized and up-to-date. Regularly scheduled Wrkflows can automatically identify and remove duplicate data, fill in missing data points, and ensure all customer data, from contacts to contracts, is current. Considering that sales departments spend over 70% of their time on average on data entry and other admin, adopting automation to support these tasks can make a huge difference.

Say goodbye to sales pain points

Contact the Wrk team to discover how our sales automation solution can eliminate pain points across your sales department and beyond. For more on how transformative sales automation can be, check out The Definitive Guide to Sales Automation.