Introduction to Sales Process Challenges

From the outside, sales processes seem fast-paced, dominated by fast-talking phone calls and client meetings. But the reality is often different: Sales departments face many challenges and are slowed by various administrative tasks, like data entry and drafting emails. While an indispensable part of the job, these tasks can be made more efficient, giving salespeople more time and resources to dedicate towards the client experience. How can you solve common sales challenges? With the help of Hybrid Automation.

Common Sales Challenges and Automation Solutions

Hybrid Automation can help you tackle many pain points that may arise in your day-to-day. Here are 3 common sales challenges that automation can help solve.

1. Too much time spent on data entry

Our first problem is all too common: sales professionals spend too much of their time doing time-intensive data entry, which means they have less time to find new leads and close deals. According to a Hubspot survey of sales professionals, only 34% of a salesperson’s time is actually spent selling: the rest is eaten up by admin tasks. This translates to fewer sales opportunities and, ultimately, less incoming revenue.

Automation is equipped to handle many of the admin tasks that salespeople are responsible for, such as data gathering for new leads—aka lead enrichment—and list management. As soon as a new lead is added into CRM software, our Lead Enrichment Wrkflow automatically searches and gathers relevant data about them from various sources, like LinkedIn and Crunchbase.

A proper lead enrichment process ensures that Sales teams have all the necessary data at their fingertips when they follow up with a prospect and can keep up the pace of the sales pipeline.

And that’s not all: other solutions, including our Deduplication Wrkflow and Sales Data & List Management Wrkflow ensure lead and sales lists remain organized and up-to-date. Our Deduplication Wrkflow removes duplicate entries and redundant data from your CRM files. It can also identify missing fields and retrieve information from other databases so that your client lists are chock-full of rich data. The Sales Data & List Management Wrkflow keeps your lists populated with fresh, qualified leads and performs regular checks to ensure that all data is up-to-date.

2. Impersonal communication

Sales departments often struggle to maintain good quality communications with their clients due to the simple fact that writing personalized emails requires a great deal of time and effort. Notably, the same statistic that found only 34% of a salesperson’s time was spent selling, also found that 21% was spent writing and sending emails. We know how important communication is, but frankly, that’s too much. Now you might be thinking that email is one of the most easily automated tasks today, and you’re not wrong. But traditional automated emails come with their own challenges. Especially in a department like Sales, where personalized communication is critical, automated emails can come off as cold and impersonal.

74% of customers report frustration when they receive non-personalized emails, so it’s really not something you can afford to neglect.

Our Personalized Email Wrkflow addresses both sales challenges by offering automation with a human touch. This balance is central to our unique Hybrid Automation approach, which combines intelligent automation with a skilled human workforce to ensure that your automated email doesn’t feel too robotic.

The Personalized Email Wrkflow is triggered when a lead is added or classified in your CRM platform. From there, it automatically searches for relevant metrics about the client on Linkedin. These details, as well as any templates, and brand guidelines are shared with members of our community of workers, who add the human touch to your correspondence. Once an email is generated and sent, an update will be added to the client’s profile. Ultimately, this Wrkflow streamlines much of emailing—particularly early follow-ups with prospects and updates for existing clients—giving Sales teams more time to dedicate towards high-quality leads that are further along the funnel. Even more importantly, custom correspondence will convert to greater email engagement, which in turn will drive sales.

3. Bad data and business silos

Another major sales pain point is poor transparency—both within teams and with the customer. Lack of transparency has many causes, including bad or outdated data, and siloed processes in and between departments, like Marketing and Sales teams, for instance.

Communication between Sales and Marketing departments directly influences the quality of customer experience and sales conversions. If that communication is lacking and centralized data is not established, potential leads could be missed, customer data won’t be consistent across platforms, and the client may receive irrelevant updates, which damages their relationship with your business.

We have a suite of Wrkflows that directly address and encourage transparency within sales processes, including the Lead Nurturing Wrkflow, Deduplication Wrkflow, Deal Management Wrkflow, and Quote & Proposal Development Wrkflow. Our Lead Nurturing Wrkflow tracks leads as they progress through the sales funnel, noting communication from Marketing and Sales departments, appointments, and sending alerts when a follow-up is needed. The Deduplication Wrkflow, as we saw, scans CRM lists and removes any duplicated values or bad data. With these automated processes in place, your Sales teams will have consistent access to accurate and up-to-date customer data and can stay on the same page as other departments.

Our Deal Management Wrkflow also encourages transparency and smooth communication with clients by facilitating meeting scheduling by integrating with Sales team calendars. The Quote & Proposal Development Wrkflow, for its part, ensures that clients receive custom quotes promptly and that proposals are drafted and contracts are approved in a timely manner. Importantly, this Wrkflow and all the others mentioned are trackable. This means sales reps as well as people in other departments can readily access information and see exactly where a client is in their journey. In other words, greater transparency.

Conclusion

If any of these sales challenges sound familiar, we can help. Our automation solution is designed to help our customers achieve greater efficiency and optimize existing processes. Because we understand that not every company has the same processes, our automation platform is also highly adaptable. Our goal is to work with you to find and implement solutions that meet your unique business needs.

From lead enrichment to the deduplication of data, we have many solutions to simplify your sales processes. Check_out_our_sales_Wrkflows!