When you hire a sales rep, what do you want them to do? Sell, right? Well, the truth is lots of their time is spent doing menial, low-value tasks like adding contacts to the CRM, cleaning up the CRM, or designating themselves and their team tasks. Automation can help with that.
We talk about it more in the blog What’s The Difference Between Marketing Automation vs Sales Automation? but automation is basically about removing the need for these menial tasks. CRMs, or customer relationship management platforms, are at the heart of the war on menial tasks.
There’s 4 steps any business can take with their CRM software to start to successfully automate their sales process. After implementing these, your reps will be able to spend more time on income-generating tasks.
1. Create task notifications to follow up with prospects
One huge problem for sales teams is forgetting to follow-up.
If you charted the no. of follow-ups and sales, there would be an extremely strong correlation between the two. You don’t need me to tell you the importance of follow-ups. Therefore, when your reps forget to follow-up, they’re leaving money on the table. Automatic task notifications can help to make sure no prospect leaves the funnel without being followed up on.
If your rep doesn’t notify the CRM to say that they’ve completed a follow-up, a notification can be sent to them and any chosen seniors to make sure that they complete it as soon as possible. This simple prompt can make sure reps remember to do follow-ups.
2. Bulk similar tasks together
One thing that makes reps inefficient is doing a variety of tasks one after another. Moving from one task to another has a terrible effect on focus.
By automatically bulking similar tasks together, CRMs like HubSpot with its task queue functionality effectively organise tasks in the most efficient way possible. This also reduces that little bit of extra work for your managers as they no longer have to think about how to organise their reps work-days. You can also choose to organise tasks based on priority.
3. Create templates for emails you frequently use
Ever find you or your reps re-writing the same email, again and again and again, with only a few minor tweaks? Over the months, the minutes spent doing really start to stack up.
The best CRMs allow you to save email templates that you want to re-use and adjust. They also come with a reporting function to measure which emails perform the best at booking meetings, upselling products and more. This saves that dreadful search for THAT file.
Whenever you or your rep need to reach out to a customer or prospect, those templates will be readily available to use and edit.
4. Create a reusable checklist or sales playbook for lead qualification
Any SOPs your team uses can be saved on the CRM. Got that killer line that converts every time? Tips for new sales reps on how to trap prospects, core objection handling material or elevator pitches can be saved in the CRM.
When a call comes in, or they’re sending an email, these materials are readily available to land a pitch. This can really improve sales enablement, and make sure any conversations with prospects yield the best results possible.
Or maybe you’re ramping up a sales development rep who keeps forgetting the qualifying criteria? You can save this information in the CRM as well.
New staff hassling you for information, again and again? Never again.
So, just to summarise: above we listed a few ways to get started with automation in sales using a CRM. Sales automation can help you improve your bottom-line by removing the need for tedious, mundane or menial tasks that distract your sales reps from actually doing sales. It also eases the pain-staking process of managing and ramping up new staff.
