What is Sales Force Automation? Definition, Benefits, and Guide

Businesses and marketers rely on different software and tools to automate their daily marketing efforts such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

There is so much technology available in the market to help sales teams eliminate the mundane part of their tasks for increased productivity. One of the best tools for automating the sales process is the Sales Force Automation software.

Sales Force Automation improves your sales team’s ability to engage with new leads, convert them to paying customers, and boost customer satisfaction which increases your customer lifetime value (CLV).

In this guide, you will learn everything you need to know about Sales Force Automation starting with a clear definition.

What is the difference between Sales Force Automation and CRM? What are the benefits and potential risks of Sales Force Automation? What are the key sales processes to automate and the best sales automation tools?

You will find answers to these questions and more, including a sales process automation checklist every sales team should use.

Let’s get started.

What is Sales Force Automation (SFA)?

Sales Force Automation, also called sales automation, involves the use of software applications or programs to conduct sales management activities. It refers to the use of “sales automation software” to create automated sales management processes and workflows for the proper administration of a business' entire inbound and outbound sales.

For businesses, sales automation serves as an effective medium through which the entire sales process is simplified. Manual, repetitive, and time-consuming sales management activities are eliminated and sales representatives have more resources on their hands to be more productive.

With the help of Sales Force Automation, sales representatives focus on more important tasks and are more accurate in completing business deals and providing sales forecasts.

Sales Force Automation is very important for every point in the whole sales process. Inbound sales management activities prompting customers to make the first move in purchasing a product become easier to execute. With sales automation, your team works with dedicated software in convincing customers about the viability of your goods or services and converting leads into sales.

Outbound sales processes are not left out. Businesses needing to repeatedly push themselves out to their target audience may find the whole process difficult and tiring in the long run.

Sales Force Automation makes outbound sales processes easier. It involves you making use of specialized software applications to directly contact potential customers and take over the whole outbound sales process in the most effective and efficient of ways.

Nonetheless, no matter the type of sales process you wish to use this software for (outbound sales and inbound sales), you enjoy automated solutions dedicated to seamless and effective contact management, opportunity management, and sales task management.

The complete history of your customer profile updates and interactions are available in one centralized workspace. Sales Force Automation allows you to track sales leads, and enjoy prompt outbound reminders and notifications to maximize the profitability of your entire sales process.

Difference Between Sales Force Automation and CRM

When talking about Sales Force Automation, customers are the main focus. Whether outbound or inbound, the whole sales process majorly involves the acquisition and conversion of customers into sales.

In doing this, customer information is collected and customer relationships are established and managed. However, if this is the case, what makes Sales Force Automation (SFA) different from Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

The major difference between these two is simple. Sales Force Automation aims at acquiring more customers while CRM aims at keeping acquired customers satisfied.

Other differences between Sales Force Automation and CRM revolve around their major concern, the information provided, and automation.

1. Major Concern

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is majorly concerned with the management of customer relationships to keep them satisfied and interested in future dealings. It involves the centralized gathering of customer data and information sourced from different historical interactions, complaints, queries, meetings, and purchase history.

Data from each customer is analyzed and customer interactions are specially optimized towards giving each client a personalized experience in the hope of increasing satisfaction.

Alternatively, Sales Force Automation is mainly concerned with acquiring these customers through sales and pipeline management tools. With Sales Force Automation, the enticement of potential customers as well as the conversion of interested individuals are given priority.

2. Information Provided

Sales Force Automation (SFA) provides businesses with beneficial information about completed sales, past sales rep performance, and future sales prospects. Information about these is then used to spot weaknesses in the inbound and outbound sales process and make improvements on them.

SFA processes focus on tasks such as prospecting, scheduling, and organizing sales activities that fall outside the scope of a CRM. All these are implemented in a bid to boost the productivity of the whole sales process in attracting more customers and, eventually, more revenue for the business.

From the above, it could be said that Sales Force Automation occurs before any form of CRM activity is possible. It is why a lot of CRM software in the market today acts as an all-in-one solution to managing the whole sales process.

CRM tools go the extra step in integrating Sales Force Automation processes into their systems for the acquisition of customers. It provides businesses with beneficial information that helps retain and keep customers satisfied.

3. Automation

While all Sales Force Automation processes are automated, the same cannot be said of CRM activities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) involves every activity, both manual and automated software-assisted, aimed at managing customer relationships. Sales Force Automation only includes automated software-assisted processes used in acquiring new customers.

Benefits of Sales Force Automation

The benefits of Sales Force Automation include increasing your sales team productivity, automatically keeping records and collecting data, decreasing the cost of sales, and reducing your response time.

1. Increase Your Sales Team Productivity

According to ConvergeHub, Sales Force Automation can boost your sales productivity by up to 14% and increase your final deal closures by 30%. Sales Force Automation allows your sales teams to focus on the most important tasks and avoid wasting time on unproductive activities.

Making use of Sales Force Automation software means freeing up extra time for your sales team members to perform more administrative tasks. Your sales representatives leave the more basic tasks to the software and have more time to focus on other activities.

Manual, day-to-day tasks are left to the software for more productive activities like calling prospects, working on strategies, or setting up appointments that are likely to result in sales.

Eliminating repetitive, manual, and time-consuming tasks gives your sales team more room to focus on strategies for customer acquisition and maintaining relationships with existing customers. You also minimize the possibility of human error arising from consistently tedious workflows. Businesses can use Sales Force Automation to reduce their Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).

With Sales Force Automation software, you avoid losing customers due to simple blunders like forgetting to contact a customer in time or omitting an important piece of information about a customer. All these processes are accurately automated, making your whole sales process more effective.

Some of the top Sales Force Automation software in the market also run on mobile devices. It means your team gets to manage the sales automation process and have access to important information for making important decisions from anywhere and at any time.

2. Automatically Keep Records And Collect Data

A lot of companies either manually store the records and data normally collected during the sales process or do not even keep track of it at all. It may be due to very tight work schedules or insufficient staff for record-keeping.

Sales Force Automation software gives such businesses a chance to keep a record of important sales process data without having to think of sparing extra time or costs.

Data is collected automatically through different sources and can be easily synced with a CRM system for proper customer management. Keeping track of data is important for any sort of business management activity.

3. Decrease The Costs Of Sales

As data is automatically collected from different sources, your sales team gains more information regarding your sales process. With Sales Force Automation software, you have access to a lot of important insights that help to improve the overall understanding of your business's unique sales process.

Insights from reporting and analytics tools allow you to know which activity is productive and which is not. With this, your business intelligence is improved and you get to effectively plan budgets targeted towards properly exploiting your future sales opportunities.

Your whole sales process is optimized with the most effective strategy and the costs accrued from unproductive, time-consuming manual tasks are totally eliminated. Sales are completed faster as you easily find customers that are more likely to purchase your product or services.

Sales Force Automation software does not only offer you a decrease in sales process-related costs. It also offers you a potential increase in sales performance and boosts your Return on Investment (ROI) as forecasts become more accurate and the process becomes quicker and more seamless.

4. Reduce Your Response Time

Sales automation can help to reduce the time used for sales administration. The Sales Force Automation software helps to immediately take care of the more basic sales process tasks. Thanks to the automation of these basic tasks, sales representatives have more time to respond to more complex sales tasks.

The more difficult processes such as the conversion of the problematic prospects are well taken care of. Representatives pay extra attention to response time and fast prospect servicing, increasing the chances of recording more sales.

Potential Risks of Sales Force Automation

Sales Force Automation tools majorly take care of the procedural or administrative tasks such as dialing, emailing, and voice mailing. The automation of these processes, however, is where all the risks abound.

1. No Personalization

According to LinkedIn's State of Sales report, 47% of key decision-makers hold that receiving specific information about them affects whether they choose to engage with a salesperson.

The same report states that 96% of decision-makers are likely to consider dealing with a business if sales representatives show an understanding of their specific business needs. Sales Force Automation does not guarantee this important personalized effect.

Sales Force Automation software can not be left to work all on its own. Your sales personnel need to work side-by-side with it and be as efficient and hardworking as the software itself.

A lot of prospects or potential customers want to know what they can specifically gain from dealing with your business. Sadly, solutions offered by Sales Force Automation software, like automated voicemails and automated emails, do not guarantee this customized outreach.

Even when contacts are split into collective groups, interactions are not personalized enough. Your sales team members are still required to have interaction with every prospect and create personalized strategies for a higher chance of enticing and converting them to sales.

2. Customer Perception May Be Affected

Another risk that arises from your sales team not being on the same wavelength as the Sales Force Automation software implemented is that your customer perceptions may be affected.

Auto dialing is one of the solutions offered by Sales Force Automation software to make the whole sales process more seamless. Contacts in your database are constantly dialed by the software until one of them is gotten on the line. This increases your chances of attracting and converting leads into sales.

But what happens when, after dialing a prospect, a salesperson is not immediately available to have a convincing discussion?

Having your prospect waiting on calls without them hearing anything does not do your sales efforts any good. If anything, it only affects how prospects view your company, especially because you are trying to attract customers you have not had business dealing with beforehand.

Dialed contacts could hang up or if a sales team member is not prepped up to give a very good pitch, that effort goes to waste.

Without consistent availability of prepared sales personnel, you stand a chance of ruining very good prospects, future dealings with them, and the overall perception of your service.

3. Money Could Be Wasted

According to a report by The Bridge Group, Sales development representative teams alone are reported to spend an average of $371 per month on sales automation tools.

Spending this amount of money per month is not the problem. The problem is the Return on Investment (ROI) you get from your sales efforts.

Automating all your prospect outreach activities means getting in touch with a lot of your contacts as fast as you can. Doing this through software may be easier but how many are you able to convert, considering these relationships are not organically built?

Subjecting all your contact outreach activities to SFA software may guarantee you contact with prospects but does not help you with converting even the most promising leads if proper measures are not taken. It is always important for sales teams to create lists of the most promising prospects and personally build relationships with them.

When you use Sales Force Automation software to contact multiple contacts, your email address could be blacklisted for spamming or contacting multiple invalid email addresses. You may even have to pay penalties for contacting individuals who have not opted in to your communications.

4. Undeveloped Sales Team

Your sales team only gets better at formulating sales strategies through experience. Constantly practicing pitching, identifying pain points, handling objections, and generally dealing with prospects, helps develop skill sets that make sales effort more efficient.

An over-automated sales process means this experience and eventual improvement of communication skills are done away with.

Without experience, your sales team suffers from a lack of preparation for more complex and difficult sales operations. Effective sales strategies are harder to come up with and your lead conversion rate eventually suffers a decline.

Key Sales Processes to Automate

Even though some sales processes are better managed manually than left to a software program, Sales Force Automation can be very beneficial for a handful of processes.

Some of the key processes include prospecting, lead tracking, and scoring, scheduling, data collection from interactions, data management, emailing, and proposals and requests for proposals (RFPs).

1. Prospecting

Before making sales, customers need to be acquired and this could be very difficult, especially when there is not enough data to drive sales efforts. Sales Force Automation software allows you to seamlessly take care of this part of your sales operations.

A Sales Force Automation system provides you with enough data and information to easily seek out the right type of prospects that are more likely to be converted to sales. You get the best leads and gain relevant information about them for more effective and personalized sales efforts.

Your most promising leads can be set apart based on data recorded from their interactions with your company. This data includes the recorded actions they perform on your website or the behavioral trends inferred through AI-powered Sales Force Automation software features.

2. Lead Tracking And Scoring

After making contact, a Sales Force Automation system assesses your prospect’s needs and provides your sales team with the information they use to relate with them based on their specific needs.

A Sales Force Automation system automatically tracks your prospects’ actions on various integrated platforms as well as their engagement with your business.

Prospect tracking helps you determine the most appropriate time to reach out and talk to each prospect. AI-powered lead scoring capabilities also help you to know which prospect is more likely to be converted.

There are a lot of individuals that fit into the “target audience” description. However, not all these individuals will eventually become customers, and not taking precautions means wasting a lot of time and resources.

With data collected through prospect tracking, a Sales Force Automation software scores each lead and allows you to efficiently exploit your lead management opportunities.

3. Scheduling

Scheduling meetings and calls is a very important step while taking a personalized approach in relating with prospects. With Sales Force Automation software, it becomes a lot easier thanks to its integration with scheduling software.

Prospects get to see the daily calendar of your sales representatives right away and pick a time that is most convenient for them.

Where sales representatives are not present to receive calls, alerts or notifications are sent to inform the whole team of an incoming call or message. It ensures that your whole sales team is always available for any scheduled meeting.

4. Data Collection From Interactions

Data collection is one of the most time-consuming and tedious tasks in the sales process. It is most especially true when you have to take notes while interacting with prospects. There is a lot of room for making errors.

Sales Force Automation software helps you record and analyze data from interactions with your prospects in real-time. Through AI-powered technologies, Sales Force Automation systems help you to capture data about the prospect, store it for future reference sales and analyze it for immediate use by your sales team.

5. Deal Management

A Sales Force Automation system helps you with everything that has to do with managing deals; from contact management to order management.

Through Artificial Intelligence, your calls, emails, and meetings are automatically recorded and, when needed, insights into these past deals and interactions are provided. These insights help you determine the best deal for a customer and recommend potential offers you could present to prospects for an increased chance at conversion.

Manual data entry and analysis are exchanged for more time for your sales team to choose the best deals and strategies specific to each prospect.

6. Emailing

Another important part of an effective sales process is email campaigns and Sales Force Automation software helps with this. Your email campaigns are automated and, with proper actions from your sales team, they are made more profitable.

Certain personalized messages are sent to certain individuals once a trigger action is performed. The Sales Force Automation software collects and analyzes data about the prospect for your sales team to study. Once the first personalized email contact is made, subsequent interactions are automated and only require little monitoring from your sales team members.

A Sales Force Automation system also keeps track of your best emails and stores them. You can refer back to them and make use of the email templates that have proved to be effective in bringing in leads.

7. Proposals and Requests For Proposals (RFPs)

A Sales Force Automation system allows you to automate the process of seeking proposals from potential supply partners. You easily track the results you get from these RFPs through generated data and easily reuse effective templates for future requests.

Sales processes are made more seamless to manage and execute with the help of sales automation software. These are important processes that a sales team cannot do without.

Automating a business’ sales processes helps to reduce the amount of repetitive tasks sales personnel get involved in. When you use Sales Force Automation in close collaboration with team members, the whole sales process inevitably yields better results.

Best Sales Automation Tools

Choosing the right sales automation software can be a tricky sales operation on its own. While there are a lot of sub-par services in the market, even the top services have different areas of sales automation they are more effective in.

Here is a list of the best software in the market as well as the form of sales automation process they provide top results for.

Sales, Marketing, and Service

1. HubSpot Sales

HubSpot Sales is one of HubSpot’s suite of free tools for small businesses. For your inbound and outbound sales, HubSpot Sales provides prospect profiles directly within your inbox. These prospect profiles show the prospect's professional history, address, mutual contacts, and email history.

You also enjoy the ability to schedule future emails, ensuring that you do not forget to send emails and your emails go out at exactly the right time.

HubSpot Sales also provides integrations with HubSpot CRM, HubSpot Marketing, Salesforce, Gmail, G Suite, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Office 365.

2. Leadsquared

LeadSquared is a CRM and marketing automation software that provides solutions to over 1000 businesses across the globe. It is one of the best sales automation software that provides dedicated solutions for a wide variety of industries.

The sales automation tool is built to handle a large number of users, millions of leads, and a lot of simultaneous activities at the same time.

3. Outreach

Outreach is a multi-purpose sales automation software tool that helps sales teams seamlessly and effectively handle all prospects, no matter how many there are.

The sales automation tool provides alerts and notifications to sales teams when leads interact with outbound campaign elements (like messages). It also helps to automatically schedule meetings or touchpoints with prospects who interact.

For more effective sales efforts, Outreach also detects and presents you with information about the best-performing times of the week to send campaign elements. Outbound campaigns are then automatically scheduled accordingly.

Lead Generation

1. Salesforce Hub

Salesforce is inarguably one of the best sales and leads management software in the market today. It offers you effective tools to manage your sales leads, customers, and sales teams.

With integrations with a wide range of sales and marketing software, your business has a more streamlined sales process.

Salesforce also lets you build enterprise apps that connect employees, engage customers, track performance and integrate platforms quickly. This service is called the App Cloud. You enjoy a single, unified collection of tools and services that offer you one of the fastest and easiest ways to generate your leads.

2. Pega Sales Automation

Pega Sales Automation is a software tool that helps your sales employees eliminate manual data entry and routine tasks by automating documented processes or transactions. Your customer service agents use the software to capture client interactions, identify query types, and deliver appropriate and personalized responses.

With an intuitive activity dashboard, your administrators track processes and employee performance through indicators and receive alerts for failed automation. It helps you act in time and avoid any failed sales effort from a failed automation process.

The sales automation software enables your team members to track agent activity and generate notes to accelerate future case resolution time.

3. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is another great lead generation tool that makes it easy for you and other businesses to convert your website visitors into leads and eventual customers. It is effective for B2B businesses as well as SaaS, eCommerce, blogs, and small business websites, among others.

With OptinMonster, you can easily acquire leads in the form of email signups, product demo requests, and webinar signups, among a lot of others.

OptinMonster presents you with a great collection of solutions to build quality leads for your unique business needs. You get to create stunning onsite marketing campaigns with over 50 stunning pre-formatted templates. A drag and drop Campaign builder and OptinMonster’s powerful personalization and A/B testing tools are also at your disposal.

You also enjoy seamless integrations with any type of website and other tools used on your website. It is compatible with WordPress websites, Shopify stores, and even HTML websites, among others. OptinMonster also offers you 1-click integrations with the best email marketing services and CRM software in the market.

Email Marketing

1. MailChimp

MailChimp is an email marketing automation platform that enables you to create, send, and analyze your multiple emails and ad campaigns. It is one of the best email marketing services for small businesses owners.

You receive complete and transparent insights into your campaigns through quality email tracking and get to view success and click-through rates, generate custom reports, and manage subscribers and un-subscribers, among others.

MailChimp also allows you to create custom templates and also provides you with an array of successful campaign templates that could prove effective or guide you in creating yours.

2. Prospect.io

Prospect.io is a sales automation software that majorly focuses on prospecting and outbound sales activities. It enables you to find and verify emails of your prospects, reach out to them via a range of templates, and easily track data on all interactions.

The sales automation software also integrates with a range of services and external platforms such as QuickBooks, Mailchimp, HubSpot CRM, Salesforce CRM, and Pipeline CRM for you to get a lot of contact information automatically.

3. Constant Contact

One of the best alternatives to MailChimp, Constant Contact is sales automation software that rates highly for its world-class support, extensive online training, and webinars to help you achieve successful sales operations.

Invoicing And Contracts

1. LeadExec

LeadExec is a cloud-based sales automation solution dedicated to marketers. It captures, routes, measures, and scores both Internet and telephone leads.

This diversity allows your team to quickly distribute leads across various channels while still collecting high-quality data to improve the value of every lead.

2. PandaDoc

PandaDoc is a sales automation software that allows you to seamlessly interact and quickly create deals with your leads without any hitches. Your contracts are formulated fast and you keep deals moving through automatic notifications, on-the-fly editing, CRM integrations, and integrated eSignatures.

You also have access to good-looking and effective pre-formatted templates, designed themes, embedded rich media, and interactivity that are customizable.

3. Keap

Keap, formerly known as Infusionsoft, is a sales automation tool that helps you properly keep prospect information in one location.

The sales automation tool tracks prospect interactions and responsiveness to guide future campaigns. It is one of the best multi-functional sales automation tools in the market.

Chatbot

A chatbot is an AI-powered software that simulates conversations with prospects through a chat interface on a website or a messaging app like Facebook Messenger, Skype, or WhatsApp.

1. TARS

TARS is a Chatbot solution that enables you to seamlessly create AI chatbots that can be integrated into your websites and Facebook Messenger with no coding needed.

The live chat software can be used for any order or booking process, feedback collection, surveys, user onboarding and training, customer support automation, and a lot more.

2. Botsify

Botsify also allows you to easily create AI chatbots that can be integrated into your website or Facebook messenger.

You enjoy an easy-to-use drag and drop interface, pre-formatted chatbot templates, as well as integrations with several top services like WordPress, Shopify, Slack, Alexa, Google Sheets, and ZenDesk. Companies like Apple and Shazam trust Botsify enough for their automated chatting operations.

3. HubSpot Chatbot Builder

HubSpot Chatbot Builder is integrated into HubSpot’s free live chat tool and allows you to build a chatbot that books meetings and provides answers to common customer support questions, among others.

The chatbot builder by HubSpot is also integrated with HubSpot’s free CRM tool. What this means is that your bots can deliver more personalized messages to your prospects based on the data collected from past interactions with customers.

What Features Should You Look For in Sales Force Automation Software?

Not all sales force automation software available in the ever-growing software market is great for your business. There are several features you should look out for when choosing a sales force automation software to use to automate your sales process.

They include the scope of lead enrichment, communication automation and personalization capabilities, CRM integration, pre-formatted email templates, and automation, meeting scheduling, deal management automation, and automated led rotation and scoring.

1. Scope Of Lead Enrichment

Lead enrichment includes the process of collecting information about a particular prospect. The range of data sources which a sales automation software uses to gather information about a prospect is important.

Data gives you an up-to-date, comprehensive profile of your prospect and allows you to head into sales conversations with more insight. The more data you have about a prospect, either on company size, industry, solutions, responsibilities, or social media presence, the more personalized your sales efforts are.

With a lot of data, it becomes easier to personally connect with prospects and earn their trust. Top sales automation tools obtain information from hundreds or thousands of data sources and you should consider these before choosing one. Data and information are the most important elements in improving any sales process.

2. Communication Automation and Personalization Capabilities

Good sales automation software allows you to automate your communications with your prospects. It is one of the repetitive tasks that your salesperson would have to engage in.

When you have a lot of prospects, manually communicating becomes a difficult task to execute properly. With automated communication capabilities, you get to delegate a lot of this repetitive task to the software to handle.

Autoresponders make use of pre-fixed templates and scripts while communicating with prospects, meaning they could prove harmful for your sales efforts. It is the reason why you should not only go for software with automated chatbots but go for software with AI-powered chatbots that send personalized messages to prospects.

AI-powered chatbots make use of data collected from past interactions to personalize communications and provide the personalized effect needed to convert prospects.

3. CRM Integration

For an effective and comprehensive sales process, your sales automation software needs to work hand-in-hand with a CRM tool. CRM helps you improve on customer relationships and keep customers satisfied after your sales automation activities yield results.

Manually adding contact data from your sales automation is a daunting task and integration with CRM software only makes it easier.

With integration with a CRM tool, data from prospect interactions like webinar participation, surveys, email subscriptions, and Facebook Lead Ads, among others can be used to effectively improve customer relationships.

4. Pre-formatted Email Templates And Automation

Email campaigns are one of the most effective outbound sales operations in the whole sales process. Its vital importance means your sales team has to always deal with everything concerning it.

Choosing a sales automation software that offers you pre-formatted email templates, or even allows you to save your existing email content as email templates, helps you save time.

For instance, emails for prospecting, meeting confirmation, and follow-up usually do not vary much. Having effective email templates for these helps you save a lot of time. Even with this, the ability to personalize the content of these templates for your prospects is important.

Access to effective templates is one thing, having to send these personalized email templates to multitudes of prospects is another.

A sales automation software that allows you to automatically create and send personalized campaign emails to prospects is important. You choose when these emails are sent and also automate follow-up emailing tasks as well.

5. Meeting Scheduling

Another factor to consider is if the software allows you to automatically schedule meetings with prospects. Some sales automation tools automatically send your prospect a link to your work schedule and prompt them to choose any open time they are comfortable with.

Choosing a sales automation software that offers meeting scheduling features is important. You skip the need to repeatedly reach out to prospects to have real-time interactions just to book meetings.

6. Deal Management Automation

Having to repeatedly log information about contact profiles and interactions just for future reference while coming up with deals becomes stressful. It is especially true in the long run when there are a lot of prospects to manage.

As this is an inevitable task in the sales process, automating any deal-related activity is important. You should look for a sales automation tool that records your calls, meetings, and emails for future personalized interactions and automates follow-up tasks with these prospects.

7. Automated Lead Rotation And Scoring

Having the capability to automate your lead rotation is very important for your sales process. Manually assigning leads to their appropriate sales representative takes up precious time and even leaves you prone to losing a prospect due to human error.

A sales automation software with an auto-rotator feature allows you to automatically assign leads according to geographic territory, company size, or a combination of a lot of other criteria.

Automated lead scoring is also important as it helps you prioritize leads for more productive sales efforts. A top sales automation software considers demographic and behavioral data and determines how feasible converting the lead is.

Examples of Sales Automation

1. Alerts About New Developments With Prospects

While monitoring prospects, sales personnel may not be on-hand all the time to notice new developments and act promptly. As prospects have different schedules and objectives themselves, sales automation means you do not have to worry about missing any change in these.

A sales automation software immediately notifies your sales team about developments. Developments could be, for instance, a new product launch by a prospect company or availability and preferential claims by a prospect individual.

Knowing these as soon as possible means you never miss an opportunity to engage prospects in the right way. You contact relevant prospects whenever suitable, either through your sales representatives or the software itself.

2. Picking Up New Prospects

Another instance of sales automation is the registration of new prospects from platforms, businesses, or services you have an interest in.

For instance, when you target a prospect company through the Sales Force Automation software, you could immediately add the contact of new employees as soon as they are hired.

Your Sales Force Automation software automatically emails them with a welcome message, for example, and could send out surveys to them in the future or an immediate response is gotten.

An automated notification can be sent to one of your sales team members to call the new prospect and schedule a virtual meeting.

3. Tracking Customer Behavior On Your Website

Keeping track of prospect behavior on your website is especially important for your inbound sales operations. Your websites are there to boycott the rigid and direct outreach operations and build organic interest in your target audience. A Sales force Automation software helps you both improve on your websites and the whole sales process through website tracking.

Having insightful data about how your visitors navigate through your website helps you know how effective each website element is. You get to improve on weak elements that seem to be killing visitors' interest. Sales Force Automation software does this without enabling cookies or leaving any other form of digital footprint on your website.

A Sales Force Automation software also tells you where your website visitors are coming from, helping you to filter your target audience for more productive results.

For example, if a lot of visitors are coming from a particular company, you know that your products or services generate interest there. You can then execute an outbound sales operation by contacting the appropriate authority in that company.

4. Preventing Subscription Expirations

Alongside your general sales process, Sales Force Automation software can automate and simplify your subscription renewal with SaaS service providers so that you do not get disconnected from important services.

As a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider yourself, you can use sales force automation to inform users enjoying a free trial about a near expiration date. With this, you ensure that they are not disconnected from your service and are converted to paying customers.

Sales Process Automation Checklist

In the entire sales process, some elements or actions prove to be more important than others. Before implementing sales automation software, there are a few tips and sales operations you need to take care of.

1. Understand Your Sales Process

Every business has its own peculiar needs and problems that sales automation software helps to take care of. Without knowledge of this, even the most promising strategies, software, or sales efforts may prove ineffective for your own business.

2. Use a Lead Scoring Program

Using a lead scoring program is not just important for saving both the costs and time spent in pursuing prospects. A lead scoring SFA system helps you sort your prospects by how feasible it is to convert them. Your sales team then knows which prospects should be given due priority for better results.

3. Automate Responses, Deal Creation, and Data Recording from Deals

By automating your deal creation process, you never miss out on convincing your prospects no matter how much they are.

Manually negotiating with every prospect can be tiring, especially because not every prospect needs to be talked with. Automating this makes sure that you save your negotiation skills for the more difficult prospects while still dealing with other prospects.

Automating follow-up responses also keeps the conversation with prospects alive at all times. Personalization is also key and this is where automating your data generated from these interactions comes in. Your Sales Force Automation software personalizes interactions using this data collected from past deals.

Sales Force Automation software automates the whole process that follows after creating deals. It automates the scheduling of meetings, signing of documents, and payment processes.

4. Create Reminders

With this feature in place, you never miss important meetings or outbound operations. Sales automation tools let you know when you have an important meeting scheduled with prospects.

Executing all these ensures that your sales pipeline and the entire sales process are as seamless as required.

Sales Force Automation FAQ

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