7 Sales Activities You Can Automate Today

While you can’t make the work day longer (and why would you want to?!), you can help your team be more productive with sales automation.

With sales automation, everyday tasks take less time, and that directly links to, you got it, more sales. Freeing up activities around lead nurturing and tedious data entry gives salespeople more time to build relationships and focus on other revenue-generating tasks. 

If you’re looking for ways to increase productivity and manage a growing pipeline without losing that personal touch that makes your business stand out, you’ll be glad to know that technology is on your side. Keep reading to find some prime examples of sales activities that you can automate with ease.

What is sales automation?

Sales automation is the use of dedicated software to automate the mundane, repetitive tasks that can slow your team down. It helps scale your sales process and enable your team to be more effective. 

There’s a surprising amount of administrative work involved in making connections, following up with prospects, and establishing a comprehensive training program that can be passed on to new team members. A range of tools are available to help lighten the workload and automate different parts of the sales process like updating lead status, sending follow-up emails, scheduling meetings, and more.

Why is sales automation important? 

With effective use of sales automation, you have the power to build profitable customer journeys that are repeatable and iterative. It’s finding that sweet spot between scalability and a higher volume of sales qualified leads while maintaining a personal touch that sustains meaningful relationships. 

Using automation to nurture prospects frees up time and creates bandwidth to work on high-impact activities such as learning new technologies or collaborating with marketing teams.

7 Sales Activities You Can Automate

• Lead scoring: Whether prospecting or collating data into a score, software can do that for you now. 
• Outreach emails: Once you’ve identified the prime leads you want to contact, nurture sequences can keep the conversation going with check-ins and ongoing interactions that are sent automatically. 
• Analytics and reporting: There’s no need to pull metrics anymore manually. Sales automation can generate reports every 2 or 4 weeks, for example, so you always know the most recent prospects and where they are in the funnel. 
• Pipeline management: With baked-in reminders for sales members, you’ll always know what stage all your deals are in with automation that works in real-time to keep you up to date. 
• Activity logging: Sales automation means you have every notification and interaction people have had with your lead in one place. For most, that’s a customer relationship management (CRM) software or similar sales enablement tech stack. This transparency allows your team to grow and stay synchronized – eliminating meetings and lapses in visibility. 
• Scheduling meetings: No more back and forth emails when someone’s available. Automation sends prospects your sales member calendars so they can choose what day and time works best for them. 
• Chatbots: A chatbot programmed with standard responses to common inquiries. Sales teams can use chatbots as a first touch for website visitors and re-route the conversation to a human respondent when necessary. Chatbots can also collect valuable information that provides context for sales reps going into the conversation.

Getting Started With Sales Automation

With the ultimate goal to increase volume in your sales pipeline, one of the easiest ways to jumpstart sales automation is through email sequences. Start with a generic, three-email interaction from a highly qualified lead who’s been handed over. Based on your past experiences and insights from your sales, marketing, and service teams, you can accumulate success stories and create a robust and personalized email that speaks to what these prospects are looking for. 

There are many other ways you can initially start using sales automation, such as integrating a chatbot or a plugin like Calendly that automatically sends a calendar link for leads to expediting meetings – it depends on what your immediate goals and challenges are. 

For more on sales automation and how it contributes to new business growth and retention of current business, read our Growth Stack Guide.