Choose the Best Software for your Sales Automation

Sales automation is more than just a fancy buzzword from sales representatives who are trying to sell sales automation software to business owners. It also fancies using pre-configured sequences with templates, and some use artificial intelligence as their cream of the crop. Sales automation software is designed to reduce or eliminate laborious and repetitive tasks from sales representatives in the sales process. 

1. Technically, sales automation means a software solution used to minimize, reduce, assist, or automate the sales tasks required to move sales leads within the sales funnel. These tasks can be a follow-up email, appointment reminders, invoicing, broadcasting updates, and event notifications. Sales representatives who use sales automation only have to focus on important touchpoints of the sales process, such as delivering demos, sending a customized proposal, and, most importantly, building relationships with prospects. 

Benefits of sales automation software

The sales funnel sometimes stuck with unmoving sales leads. This is due to the fact that your sales representatives don’t know where to guide and nurture your leads properly. This is where sales automation comes in by pointing the leads in the right direction after acquiring them. Every sequence in the sales automation is programmed to move the leads one conversion at a time. It also helps the sales representative to make an informed decision about their leads, giving them the best possible results for a close sale.

Sales automation can give numerous benefits to businesses, and these benefits may vary depending on the business goals and needs. Here are some common benefits when you have sales automation in your business. 

Benefit #1 Improve efficiency and productivity

A sales automation tool can quickly scan your prospect's contact information on a website. Some automation tools have web extensions like chrome browser extensions that highlight the name, phone number, address, and position of your prospect. This can speed up the data entry process. Some sales automation software can instantly verify email addresses and phone numbers before storing them in the database. 

Sales automation also verifies email addresses, whether it’s a non-existent email address or a long-forgotten one. It then scrubs or updates the email from your CRM and contact database. Your sales representative would rarely have to do these tasks and can focus on sending personalized emails to their prospects. Your sales teams can get the most of their day being productive in selling products and services rather than verifying email addresses. 

Benefit #2 Increase accuracy and consistency of data

Human error is inevitable in any work environment. Your colleague could have misspelled the name of a client, resulting in the wrong invoice receiver. Maybe your secretary might have a slight typographical error in the phone number of your next appointment, resulting in calling the wrong person on the line. These can be eliminated by software automation. Moreover, the main job of sales automation is to assist humans in doing work but not totally eliminate the work itself. 

Machines are accurate in storing and retrieving data, and with this property, it is possible for sales automation software to store, update, and cross-check prospect data instantly. This information can be the prospect’s name, phone number, job title, company, email address, geographical location, etc. This assures you that you can rely on sales automation software to keep your sales data consistent and accurate. 

Benefit #3 Create, build, and maintain customer relationships

Hyper-personalization in sales has become more popular since the post-pandemic. Many prospects have started to move more within the digital channel. This made the sales process more data-driven to learn more about the prospect. Some sales automation can identify whether a prospect has visited a competitor’s website and notify a trigger for the sales representative to take action. It does not just collect data but can give lead scoring determining the sales potential score from a prospect. 

It might sound scary that sales automation is spying on customers’ profiles, but it is not. It extrapolates large data and analyzes them together to see emerging patterns of behavior from segmented profile lists. This helps the sales representatives build a humanized customer relationship without the awkward, sweet conversation when making a sale. Finally, it identifies prospects’ needs for you to find a solution to that needs.  

Benefit #4 Simplify data reporting

Since sales automation deals with numerous data, it records all sales data in one place. This is for your sales managers to make an intuitive report about what happened to a particular campaign. Sales automation software made it easy to export data like customer engagement in social media, number of voicemail drops, duration of replies in text campaigns, and so on. Depending on your boss ' preference, you can report these data in charts, spreadsheets, or PDFs. 

After extracting the reports and analyzing the data, you can automate sales workflow based on significant data touchpoints from the previous data. For example, you can identify which voicemail recordings had the most callbacks and the duration of their callbacks. You can tweak your sales automation to have auto-dial and call triggers for those voicemail drops. 

Consider these 5 factors in choosing the best sales automation software

At this point, you already know the benefits of sales automation. These are some of the important factors to consider in choosing the right sales automation software. 

#1 It can manage large scale sales outreach campaigns

It can help you oversee outbound call campaigns. It lets you know where the leads are coming from, the lead nurturing stage, the number of leads worked by every sales agent, how it was qualified, and who performed the closed deals. 

Furthermore, it can help you build great email templates and replies, schedule email follow-ups, let you know the click-through rate (CTR) between email campaigns, what messages are working best for certain profiles, and verify the email addresses before starting the campaign.

Furthermore, it can broadcast multiple text messages simultaneously, analyze the response rate, schedule automated text replies, and move the lead when it expresses interest. Furthermore, it monitors social media traffic, lets you know what people are talking about on social media, and view audience reach and other social media metrics.

#2 It can quickly determine quality qualified leads 

Sales automation filters out the fakers and identifies the most qualified leads. Some prospects express they wish to purchase, but their online behavior says otherwise. Sales automation can let you see if they have interacted with your socials, talk to a previous agent, use a fake IP address, and do other things that will help your sales representative decide to pursue a lead or not. 

It also prioritizes leads with the most interest in purchasing by determining its lead score to make it a qualified lead to focus on. This will reduce the wasted efforts on leads that will likely result in a dead-end. It can save your sales representative the frustration of pursuing the wrong lead in the first place. 

#3 It can provide comprehensive analytics 

Informed decisions are the best decisions. Sales automation software shows analytics on sales conversions, form completions, email and text open rates, CTR, and contact engagement. It helps the organization to take the best direction of the campaign. If the campaign isn’t doing well in text, then maybe it can deliver great results with calls. 

#4 It allows A/B testing

Sales automation helps and prevents businesses recover from further loss by doing A/B testing. This set of tests identify which channels in a campaign are performing well and vice versa. It can also identify which segments of leads are passive or active in receiving a certain campaign. It lets you know whether to stop or continue a campaign that isn’t getting any results. 

#5 It can automate and personalize communication

Sales automation software technically knows more about your prospects than you do. It utilizes the collected data to generate personalized communication for your prospects. This greatly helps your sales representatives build a stronger relationship with them. No more awkward scripts and generic templates. It helps the sales team to have a unified and consistent sales message for the company.

Best software for Sales Automation

Here is the 5 best sales automation software for your business. 

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a sales-driven CRM solution that also functions as an account management tool for the sales and marketing processes. It can organize calls and emails. Synchronize contacts and schedules across different devices. Its ability to demonstrate the sales process from start to finish can benefit small to midsized businesses (SMBs). It can cut through the work and eliminate second-guessing for sales teams to make full decisions head-on. 

Overloop

Overloop is designed to increase outbound sales reach for any campaign. It is dedicated for the sales team to close more deals and initiate a number of conversations with their prospects. The platform can email hundreds of prospects, create unlimited campaigns, generate prospect lists, verify emails, drip and track emails over time. It has an email finder that automatically finds an email in seconds. Its chrome extension can look up an email address when you’re on the prospect’s website. Lastly, an email verifier to verify an email address in real-time.

Aloware 

Aloware is a contact center solution with built-in sales automation and sequences, sales dialer, auto-dialer, and power dialer. The contact center software is designed to maximize the sales potential over the phone. It can connect to your lead instantly via call and text whenever an email comes from the lead generator. It lets you create a follow-up sequence and consistently fill your call campaign list with hot leads. Finally, Aloware is a contact center software built to supercharge sales and support operations with unlimited calling, texting, and automation tools that can be integrated with popular CRMs like HubSpot, Zoho, and Pipedrive.

Mailchimp 

Mailchimp offers customizable buyer’s journey and marketing workflows. You can create personalized marketing workflows for each customer you have. Schedule and optimize the send-out time of emails to prospects. Using APIs, it can send and trigger-based messages about purchasing mentions and account behavior. It has more than 100 pre-built automation that can match any business’ needs from small to big enterprises. 

Copper 

Copper is a customer relationship management tool that is simple to use with its drag-and-drop functionality. Sales managers can define each stage of the sales tasks in the workflow. You can then set up an email sequence for follow-ups until each stage is completed. It provides the necessary tools to coach and train sales representatives for better tracking and closing sales in their pipeline. Its G Suite integrations can retrieve data like calls, contact information, deas made, email interaction, files, etc., from all sales interactions. 

 

EngageBay

EngageBay is a sales automation CRM software geared towards small businesses and startups. You get over 50 sales tools ranging from communication channel analysis to lead follow-ups and pipeline management. With EngageBay, you get a holistic view of every interaction you’ve had with your leads. You can place and receive calls directly from the CRM, enhance sales proposals through customer behavior analysis, and automate your sales funnel through the multi-step visual workflow builder. EngageBay even offers account-based marketing to help you organize companies and run targeted campaigns. 

Are you ready for Sales Automation?

Should you choose sales automation already? If all the features, tools, and benefits above can help your business greatly, then it’s definitely a yes. If your sales problems can be solved by sales automation, then it is time to invest in it. Is your team ready to shift to sales automation software? If your team is getting caught up with a lot of sales admin tasks, then it is perfect for equipping them with sales automation software to add to their sales enablement tools.